Matt Reeves: ‘The Batman’ TV Series Changed From Gotham PD to Arkham After Creative Differences

Zack Sharf
·3 min read
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“The Batman” television spinoff series centered on the Gotham police department is on indefinite hold, Matt Reeves confirmed during an interview on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast. HBO Max announced the series in July 2020, with “The Batman” filmmaker Reeves and “Boardwalk Empire” creator Terence Winter at the helm of the project. Winter exited the project in November 2020 and was replaced by Joe Barton in January 2021. Rumors of creative differences circulated around Winter’s exit, and Reeves now confirmed HBO Max did not see eye-to-eye on the original plan for the show.

“One thing that we’re not doing that I was gonna do — so there’s the Gotham police show, which, that one actually is put on hold,” Reeves said. “We’re not really doing that.”

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Reeves said the original plan for the Gotham PD series was to take inspiration from Sidney Lumet’s “Prince of the City” and center the show on a corrupt Gotham cop. The series was set one year before “The Batman,” as the Gotham police force must reckon with the emergence of Batman and its own corruption.

“It wasn’t going to be a Batman story, it was going about about this corrupt cop,” Reeves said. “And it was going to be about how the worst gang in Gotham were the GCPD. And [the cop] was going to come across paths, he would have touched paths with Gordon who would have been — it would have been someone to measure him against. But it would be a battle for [the cop’s] soul.”

Reeves said the idea was “super cool, [but] they didn’t not like the idea, they just wanted to center a show on a character who was more — I get it,” alluding to the studio’s desire to center the show on a less corrupted protagonist. “So I was like, ok. So maybe someday we’ll do that show.”

Barton weighed in on Twitter about the Gotham PD idea being canned, writing, “Guess if you post your wins you should also post your losses. Sadly adding this to the ‘ones that got away’ column. It really would have been something special. Hope Matt gets to make it one day.”

The Gotham P.D. series is not happening, but that doesn’t mean “The Batman” isn’t getting a television spinoff. Reeves revealed on The Cyber Nerds that the spinoff has now emerged as a series about Arkham Asylum.

“We’ve actually now [moved] more into the realm of exactly what would happen in the world of Arkham as it relates coming off of our movie and some of the characters and their origins… almost leaning into the idea of… it’s like a horror movie or a haunted house that is Arkham,” Reeves said. “The idea, again the way that Gotham is a character in the movie, I really want Arkham to exist as a character. You go into this environment and encounter these characters in a way that feels really fresh. And so in our work on Gotham, that story started to evolve, and it started feeling [like], ‘Wait, we should really lean into this.’ And then that’s kinda where that’s gone.”

The Arkham series is one of two shows being spun out of “The Batman,” which just topped the U.S. box office with $134 million in its debut. Colin Farrell’s Penguin character is getting his own series on HBO Max written by Lauren LeFranc and executive produced by Reeves.

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