The Penguin airs its final episode this Sunday, and while the jury's out on whether it will ever get a second season, it's clear that HBO and Warner Bros. Discovery are happy with how well the show has been received. The Penguin was spun off from Matt Reeves' 2022 movie The Batman, and I think it improves on its source. It's clear that Reeves and company are, at the least, interested in making other shows starring Batman villains. But which ones?
Well, according to Devin Faraci, who operates the Marvelvision podcast, the next DC villain show will be about the Joker, played once again by Barry Keoghan, who debuted his take on the iconic character in a cameo at the end of The Batman. As The Penguin spans the time between The Batman and the upcoming The Batman: Part II, the idea is that a Joker show would span the time between Part II and Part III.
The Joker is the most famous supervillain in history, so it's no surprise that Warner Bros. Discovery would want to make a show about him. Also, they already introduced him in The Batman, so the setup is there. On the other hand, the Joker shows up so often some fans think he's over-exposed; some of us are still reeling from Joker: Folie à Deux, which landed with a thud among critics and audiences alike. But Reeves has a franchise to build and the Clown Prince of Crime puts butts in seats, so he's bound to get the spotlight sooner or later.
That said, the Joker isn't the only Batman villain capable of shouldering the weight of their own show. As long as we're talking about potential spinoffs, may we suggest these?
Catwoman
Even more than the Joker, Catwoman is an obvious choice to build a show around. Not only was she introduced in The Batman, played by Zoë Kravitz, but she got up to quite a lot; she built up a relationship with Batman, we learned her backstory, etc. At the end of The Batman, she left Gotham City before the city descended into chaos. Where'd she go?
Catwoman has a long history to draw on. She's bad enough to steal from people, but good enough that she's often painted as a hero or anti-hero in her own right. She's a thrill-seeker but also has a heart. She's well-intentioned enough for Batman to trust her but devioius enough to betray him. She's a pretty complex character and someone I'm sure could carry their own TV show.
Two-Face
Two-Face is a classic Batman villain with an origin story that would fit right in with the gritty, down-to-earth tone of Matt Reeves' Batman universe. In most versions, he's a lawyer named Harvey Dent who has a psychotic break after his face is horribly scarred, becoming the villain Two-Face.
We've seen Dent's story play out onscreen before, most notably when he was played by Aaron Eckhart in the 2008 movie The Dark Knight. In the way The Penguin was a crime drama, a Two-Face show could be a legal drama, showing how Harvey starts out with good intentions but finds himself sunk too deep into the criminal muck of Gotham City, with devastating consequences. Maybe he could get his face scarred halfway through the show, struggle with his new life for a while and finally emerging as the villain we know at the end. It could be a great role for the right actor.
Poison Ivy
When talking about which villains to explore on the small screen, The Penguin director Craig Zobelsaid that he'd like to see a series about Poison Ivy, an environmentally conscious villain who takes her zeal for protecting the planet to murderous, megalomaniacal extremes. She usually uses poisons as her weapons, and in her more fantastical interpretations has nigh-mystical control over plant life.
The Penguin, Catwoman and the Joker are all villains who are fairly grounded in the real world; they're criminals, and Batman fights criminal. Poison Ivy can start inching into broader, more openly comic book-y territory, but that doesn't have to be a bad thing, and there are probably ways to sand off her weirder edges if the team is so inclined. Imagine a version of Poison Ivy — real name Pamela Isley — who starts her journey as a high-level research scientist at a multi-national biotechnology firm, only to find that the company she works for is harming the planet by pumping as many harmful drugs into the market as possible and not caring about the adverse effects so long as the money keeps flowing. She decides to do something about it and finds herself becoming a supervillain in the process.
Honestly, there are angles a show could take where Poison Ivy comes out looking like the hero. I think one of the reasons she's stuck around as a popular villain for so many years is because the more we learn about what big companies are doing to the planet — did you know that global warming just crossed a new, alarming threshold? — the more justified her crusade seems to be. A team of writers could have a field day exploring those themes.
The Scarecrow
One more for the road: The Penguin has introduced a character named Dr. Julian Rush, played by Theo Rossi. He's a psychiatrist at Arkham Asylum. That reminds me of Jonathan Crane, the Batman supervillain otherwise known as the Scarecrow, a psychology professor obsessed with the nature of fear. He creates a toxin that unlocks people's deepest fears. From there, it's a hop, skip and a jump to him declaring himself a supervillain and trying to terrify the world into worshipping him.
If The Penguin is a crime drama, the Two-Face show a legal drama and the Poison Ivy series all about corporate malfeasance, a Scarecrow show could bring in horror elements. Imagine a series where Dr. Crane works at Arkham or some other hospital and discreetly tests his fear toxin on patients, going further and further until he's caught. As he sees it, he has only one choice left: own it and become the Scarecrow. I would expect lots of trippy hallucinogenic sequences showing us what his victims see.
It is known that Batman has the best rogue's gallery in all of comics. The Penguin has gotten this hypothetical series of shows off to a great start. It's hard to maintain that kind of quality from show to show over a long period of time, but if they can pull it off, the rewards will be huge, for everone.
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h/t Forbes