Building Batman's crime saga: Matt Reeves on scrapped spinoffs, The Penguin, and what comes next

Batman has been Matt Reeves' hero since he was 3 years old. 

The filmmaker behind Cloverfield, two Planet of the Apes films and — more importantly for this story — 2022's Robert Pattinson-led The Batman has vivid memories of being ill in his childhood home in Long Island. Bedridden with a high fever, he imagined scenes from 1966's Batman TV series, starring Adam West, playing out all over his room, as if they were projections on walls. "Even though I was sick, I felt safe because Batman was on the ceiling," Reeves, now 58, recalls. It seems DC's Caped Crusader continued his watch over Reeves, who, after moving with his family to Los Angeles years later, pursued a career in movies.

Reeves followed his childhood passion of making amateur films on an 8-millimeter camera all the way to the University of Southern California in the 1980s. He reasoned: George Lucas, the father of Star Wars, went to USC, so he needed to go to USC. He enrolled in a screenwriting course run by Jeph Loeb, a scribe behind 1985’s Teen Wolf who would go on to pen beloved Batman comics such as The Long Halloween, Hush, Dark Victory, and Haunted Knight.

Reeves never considered himself a writer. Writing was merely the first step to make a movie. Loeb changed that. "He put us through this series of exercises," Reeves says of Loeb. "We just started working on screenplays. He came up to me and he said, 'You can write, and I want you to really take that seriously.'”

Decades later, those words still stick with Reeves as he actively works to expand the stylized world he launched with The Batman into a number of projects, including drama series The Penguin (which premiered on Max this week before an airdate on HBO this Sunday). It feels stranger than fiction that the man who christened Reeves' writing is the same person whose comics are now influencing the look of his own take on Gotham City. “I could see that they had such a cinematic sensibility,” Reeves says of Loeb’s comic titles. “I could say, ‘You're doing a Godfather-esque thing, but within the Batman world. I get it.’”

The Batman, about the early days of Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne stalking the alleys of Gotham while grappling with the Riddler (Paul Dano), gave the titular hero a street-level grit in the vein of Taxi Driver and The French Connection. The Penguin, which brings back Colin Farrell’s Oz Cobb from that first movie, is similarly a Scarface story about a low-level gangster who takes advantage of a power vacuum in the criminal underworld after the Riddler offed his boss, mobster Carmine Falcone (John Turturro).

And this is but the tip of the iceberg (not to be confused with Oz’s club, the Iceberg Lounge). The events of the eight-episode The Penguin, which takes place one week after The Batman, will directly lead into the still-under-wraps plot of The Batman Part II, currently scheduled to hit theaters on Oct. 2, 2026. Farrell’s Oz is already set to return for that sequel, as well. And Reeves and his producing partner Dylan Clark are considering even more tie-in television series.

"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 explains. "Then when I was talking to Warner Bros. about signing for TV, I said what will be exciting to me is to take characters [where] 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."

That's where Reeves got the name for this master plan: The Batman Epic Crime Saga, a series of interconnected movies and shows that depict different corners of the Dark Knight's playground. Some DC fans online are already playing with a more snackable acronym for the name. Is it BECS ("Batman Epic Crime Saga")? Is it TBECS ("The Batman Epic Crime Saga")? "The problem is that I always like the full title," Reeves comments. "It's funny, we were doing a thing with marketing, they were going like, 'So the next chapter in the Batman saga...' I'm like, 'Oh, sad.'"

Reeves' plans for The Batman Epic Crime Saga changed considerably over the years, as did the company he developed it for. In July 2020, at a time when the chief streaming platform of Warner Bros. and HBO's parent company WarnerMedia was HBO Max, his first DC drama series came to light: a story set in the Gotham City Police Department, with Boardwalk Empire creator Terence Winter working alongside him and Clark to develop it. There were also reports in the Hollywood trades about plans to make another Bat-adjacent series set at the infamous Arkham Asylum. Over the years, as Discovery purchased WarnerMedia to create the now-merged Warner Bros. Discovery, and HBO Max rebranded as Max with a whole new pipeline in place to expand franchises across movies and TV, many other DC projects, like the Wonder Twins and Batgirl movies, were completely scrapped. Reeves' work, however, survived the culling, even as James Gunn and Peter Safran, the two new heads of DC Studios, carve out plans for a completely separate connected entertainment universe. (Batman looking out once again, perhaps?)

The Penguin, now spearheaded by showrunner and lead writer Lauren LeFranc, itself is a perfect illustration of how The Batman Epic Crime Saga achieved the state that it's in. "In the process of figuring out what something is, it evolves," Reeves explains. "When I was describing what it was that we wanted to do, I think [HBO CEO] Casey [Bloys] didn't want us to be too protective of the marquee characters, as if we were only going to do those in the movies. I got it right at that moment." So he pitched a tweaked concept about one of those marquee characters, Farrell's Oz Cobb, a relatively small figure of The Batman who played a crucial role as a red herring of the mystery.

The Batman ended in a place where the Riddler murders Carmine Falcone, the biggest mob boss in town, and floods entire boroughs of Gotham by blowing up the seawall. "I was describing to [Bloys] how I wanted to do this story for Oz as the beginning of the next movie," Reeves mentions of The Batman Part II. "I deliberately ended [The Batman] in a place where [Zoe Kravitz's] Selena is saying it's going to be bloody. This is the moment of greatest hope, but it's also the most dangerous moment that's been in Gotham for a long time. So Batman's going to be right at the center of that. When I was describing the beginning of the story of this underestimated criminal who we all know becomes the kingpin, Casey was like, 'Oh, that's the show! We want to do that show.'"

While the GCPD series did not move forward, parts of that treatment were reworked for The Penguin. Similarly, the Arkham show as it was originally conceived isn't going ahead, but Reeves clarifies, "The things that we're talking about [now] are evolved versions of those things. 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."

He's not ready to reveal what those next plans are, and in truth, some of it is predicated on how audiences respond to The Penguin. Yet he feels confident that Bloys, as well as another big wig, Sarah Aubrey, head of Max Original Programming, maintain excitement for what else they can do together. And yes, he does have general guidelines for what that will all be.

One, Pattinson's Batman will stick to the movies, at least for now. That's why Reeves and his team decided not to include him at all in this first series; the show is Oz's story, not to be overshadowed by the Bat. "That's not to say that there would never be an appearance by Batman or Bruce or something like that [on a future series]," Reeves notes. "Lauren and I did speak: Do we want to find a way to get Rob to somehow be in this show? But that was an afterthought."

Speaking to more broad themes, he muses on how Gotham is perennially corrupt. "[It's] the idea that it draws people in the way that it does with Oz Cobb and this idea of trying to grab for the American Dream, the dark side of the American Dream," he says. Each title set in this Gotham world will offer a different shade to that dark American Dream, but Reeves doesn't want it to feel like homework. You don't have watch The Batman to understand The Penguin and you don't have to watch The Penguin to understand the events of The Batman Part II.

"It's more that it's taking place within this same world," he continues. "If you do watch the whole thing, it is an epic narrative and a meditation on the corruption and why Gotham is the way it is. When I talk about the other shows that we're talking about doing, what's exciting is to think about going down another alley that we weren't able to go down with The Penguin and The Batman." 

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Reeves is now gearing up for the next movie sequel. The script is finished, he confirms, and everyone is preparing to start production next year. [Editor's Note, Dec. 19, 2024: After the publication of this article, DC Studios head James Gunn wrote on Threads, "There hasn’t yet been a first draft of a script." Reeves clarifies he's "finishing the script," saying, "We've given big parts of what we've written so far to DC and they know what we're doing."] He does tease that "there's a period of time" Part II will jump to after the first film and TV series. "Oz does become one of the entry points into the movie," he adds. "I can't tell you where it goes from there, except to say that we're super excited about it."

The Batman of his childhood imaginations would be proud.