There are only two episodes of The Penguin left, and I predict they will blow people away. The show, a spinoff of director Matt Reeves' movie The Batman, has been a big success both critically and with audiences, bigger than I expected from a show about a B-tier Batman villain. Colin Farrell has turned in an electrifying performance as up-and-coming gangster Oswald Cobb, and everything will come to a head soon.
Now that The Penguin has been a success, could we see other shows set in what Reeves has given the somewhat cringey name of The Batman Epic Crime Saga? The short answer is yes: “I can tell you this, we would love to be able to do more," the director recently told TheWrap. "e are already talking to HBO about . The opportunity of being able to then on HBO, go and explore characters that wouldn’t be able to have that kind of real estate creatively, as we were able to do with Oz, that is something that we are talking to HBO about. They’re very excited about that idea. That’s something that we really, really hope we’re going to be able to do.”
Some potential ideas are already in the air. To start, the idea of more seasons of The Penguin has been floated; Farrell seems game but has made it clear he's not looking forward to wearing all those prosthetics again. It's also possible we could get a spinoff about another Batman villain. Episode director Craig Zobel even has one in mind: "Which other rogue would I like? I think that I would love to see Matt Reeves' universe version of Poison Ivy," he told Inverse. "I think that would be cool."
Reeves and his team even developed a couple other ideas before settling on The Penguin, including a show set inside the Gotham police department and another at Arkham Asylum. But they pivoted when HBO executive Casey Bloys told Reeves to think bigger. “As we were doing it, there was a point where Casey Bloys said, ‘Look, I just want to make sure you aren’t saving the marquee characters for the theatrical experience. This is HBO.’ And I said, ‘Oh.’”
Hence they decided to go with a series about the Penguin, who had already appeared in The Batman, alongside Robert Pattinson as Bruce Wayne. "I always wanted to make sure that each of the movies that we did with Rob, that the central arc, the emotional arc of the story would be Batman and Bruce's," Reeves explained to Entertainment Weekly. "Then when I was talking to Warner Bros. about signing for TV, I said what will be exciting to me is to take characters there's not enough real estate in a movie to cover their story in full and to really dig into them. I want it to all be this sweeping Batman crime epic."
Per EW, parts of the Gotham PD show were incorporated into The Penguin, and Reeves isn't ruling out the possibility of repurposing the Arkham Asylum show somehow either. "The things that we're talking about are evolved versions of those things," he said. "It's not like that just didn't work. It was like, we need to evolve this. I would describe it less as something that didn't work out and more as something that is still along a path toward arriving at its destination."
As for the Penguin himself, he will show up on the big screen in The Batman Part II, which is due out in October of 2026. Reeves revealed that there will a time jump between The Penguin and the start of the new movie, but didn't provide specifics. "Oz does become one of the entry points into the movie," he said. "I can't tell you where it goes from there, except to say that we're super excited about it."
After enjoying the Penguin, I'm excited about it too; it would be pretty cool if Farrell's Penguin was the main villain of the next movie after I've gotten to know him so well on his own show. But that'll be then. For now, new episodes of The Penguin air Sunday nights on HBO and Max.
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