The Batman Director Gives Details about His Cancelled Gotham Spinoff Series

Before the release of The Batman, word was going around that HBO wanted to make a spinoff series that focused on the Gotham police force. Batman director Matt Reeves has recently confirmed that the series has been put on ‘indefinite hold’, but that doesn’t mean we can find out details of what could have been.

Talking to the Happy Sad Confused podcast (via Variety), Reeves explains that the show would have been taking inspiration from Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City, and that it would focus on a corrupt GCPD cop.

“It wasn’t going to be a Batman story, it was going about this corrupt cop… And it was going to be about how the worst gang in Gotham were the GCPD. And [the cop] was going to come across paths, he would have touched paths with Gordon who would have been — it would have been someone to measure him against. But it would be a battle for [the cop’s] soul,” explained Reeves.

The series was also said to take place a year before the events of The Batman, and would have the cops trying to handle the emergence of the Dark Knight.

Apparently, the series was canceled because HBO didn’t want the protagonist to be a corrupt character. Odd, considering that’s what they did with Boardwalk Empire, and that series was critically acclaimed.

 Even though the cop show was canceled, Reeves says that the series has evolved now to focus on characters in Arkham Asylum. He tells The Cyber Nerds:

“We’ve actually now [moved] more into the realm of exactly what would happen in the world of Arkham as it relates coming off of our movie and some of the characters and their origins… almost leaning into the idea of… it’s like a horror movie or a haunted house that is Arkham… The idea, again the way that Gotham is a character in the movie, I really want Arkham to exist as a character. You go into this environment and encounter these characters in a way that feels really fresh. And so in our work on Gotham, that story started to evolve, and it started feeling [like], ‘Wait, we should really lean into this.’ And then that’s kinda where that’s gone.”

We don’t know when we’re going to get a look at these spinoffs, but it would be really great to have the grimy world of Gotham fleshed out. We haven’t even mentioned the spinoff series that will focus on Colin Farrell’s Penguin and his rise to power.

In the meantime, you can check out The Batman now screening in theaters.