A new chapter of Batman live-action movies history began in 2022 when Robert Pattinson donned the cape and cowl for The Batman, and he’ll return to the role in 2026 for The Batman: Part II. In addition to the main film series though, this continuity crafted by filmmaker Matt Reeves has expanded into television, with The Penguin now airing on HBO and streaming to those with a Max subscription. However, before the Colin Farrell-led series entered development, the plan had been for the first TV show set in the universe to focus on the Gotham City Police Department, and learning new details about this vacated project makes it hurt more knowing what could have been.
Terence Winter, the creative mind behind Boardwalk Empire and Tulsa King, spoke on The Playlist’s Bingeworthy podcast about the time he spent working on this GCPD show with Reeves, with the intention being that he would have been the showrunner had it moved forward. Here’s what Winter had to say about the plot:
The idea was that we were going to do a 1970s cop show— something that felt like [Sidney Lumet’s 1981 crime and police drama ‘Prince of the City,’ but in the Gotham City Police Department. It was going to have that [‘70s] feel. It was going to be a present-day cop who is like a third-generation Gotham City cop, you know, his grandfather, his dad, and, you know, and Gotham City was largely corrupt. And this is the guy we meet in the present day who’s realizing that he’s kind of on the wrong side. The Batman was somebody that lived in that world, but you never really saw him. And it was really all about the police department and sort of this guy.
This sounds like it would have been the Batman Epic Crime Saga’s equivalent of the Gotham Central comic book series that writers Ed Brubaker and Greg Ruck worked on with artist Michael Lark. While Batman’s presence would certainly have been felt, the main purpose of the series would have been to explore the inner workings of the GCPD, particularly by following along with this third-generation police. Considering the hyper realistic world that The Batman takes place in, this show sounds like it would have been a great way to expand this mythology, but Matt Reeves ultimately didn’t jive with what Terence Winter crafted, and the latter departed the project in late 2020. As he recalled:
And I worked on it for a while. And ultimately, you know, Matt wasn’t feeling it. And I left; I know they brought in another guy after me. I can’t remember his name, the guy who did ‘Tokyo Vice.’ He worked for a while on it, but that didn’t go anywhere. I have no idea what he did. And then I read about The Penguin.
Despite how things turned out, Winter doesn’t hold any ill will towards Reeves, as sometimes two people just aren’t “in sync creatively.” He also acknowledged that because there had already been Fox’s Gotham series, which ran for five seasons and didn’t show Batman until the very end, that “kind of stepped on the toes of our idea a little bit, even though ours was going to be totally very different.” Winter likes what he’s seen of The Penguin so far though and said that creator showrunner Lauren LeFranc and her team did “a great job.”
There was also an Arkham Asylum series being developed for this Batman franchise, but it was officially scrapped in July. So The Penguin is the only TV show set for the Batman Epic Crime Saga for now, but maybe later this year or in 2025, we’ll learn about a new project that’s in the works. New episodes of The Penguin air Sunday nights on HBO, and The Batman: Part II arrives on October 2, 2026.
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