Matt Reeves’ Batman saga will continue and grow

There’s always something to do with the DC movies, especially when they involve Batman. While The Penguin will finally be released next week, a wait that is taking longer than expected Batman Part II (thanks to Covid and strikes) some people are worried that Matt Reeves won’t be able to do everything he apparently plans to do.

But according to Reeves himself, people have nothing to worry about. In a recent interview with Collider, he assured that his Batman saga will be played out in full and that it will “stay very close to the path that we envisioned.” So far, the biggest deviation has come in the form of The Penguin: he always knew he wanted to continue the story of the future crime lord and the “beginning of his rise to power.” But instead of letting Oswald’s story be a “gateway” to Part II, It grew into a genre of its own, partly out of a desire not to limit Reeves’ plans to the theater alone.

Reeves recalled how HBO chief content officer Casey Bloys initially told him that they wanted “something in the series that was like one of these big characters, not hoarding it, not saving it all for the theatrical experience.” He chose Penguin because he appears in that first film “as a sort of middle-of-the-road, sort of overlooked, mocked figure, who’s not in anyone’s eyes the kingpin as we know him in the lore. That was intentional because I wanted to — while it wasn’t Batman’s origin story, I wanted these other characters’ origin stories.”

What “other characters” could Reeves be referring to? He remained tight-lipped, though a recent roundtable conference at The Direct offered a small hint. During that meeting, producer Dylan Clark hinted that another spinoff was in the works, one ostensibly different from the Arkham Asylum-set spinoff that was shelved last July. A reporter reportedly asked if a legal drama starring Harvey Dent was being considered, to which Reeves replied that that question was “certainly in the direction that our conversations have been going.”

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