HBO Max is counting on audiences wanting to see more of Gotham City after director Matt Reeves’s The Batman is released late next year.
The streaming service has announced that they are giving a series committment to an as-yet-titled series that will be spinning out of Reeves’ upcoming Batman reboot. According to Variety, the show is expected “to build on the film’s examination of the anatomy of corruption in Gotham City.”
In a statement, Reeves said, “This is an amazing opportunity, not only to expand the vision of the world I am creating in the film, but to explore it in the kind of depth and detail that only a longform format can afford.”
There is no word if any The Batman cast members such as Jeffrey Wright (Commissioner Jim Gordon) or John Turturro (gangster Carmine Falcone) will crossover to the new show.
Terence Winter, who worked as a writer/Producer on The Sopranos before going on to create Boardwalk Empire for HBO, will be writing and executive producing the series. Reeves will also serve as an executive producer.
Of course, this is not the first television series to explore the Gotham City underworld. Fox’s Gotham series spent five seasons between 2014 and 2019 telling a story of Gotham City slowly being overrun by a variety of supervillains before the first appearance of the city’s Dark Knight Detective, Batman. But while I found that the show started strong, once it began to lean too heavily into the rise of the various members of Batman’s rogues gallery it started to drift into a dark camp tone that I felt didn’t really suit the materials. Since the new show will be taking its cues from Reeves’s upcoming Batman film, it remains to be seen how this show will approach its story.
