The Batman Spin-Off Series Will Focus on Arkham Asylum, Says Matt Reeves

Arkham is home to Batman’s biggest, nastiest villains.

The Gotham City PD spin-off series at HBO Max that’s set to exist in the same world as The Batman is shifting gears to focus on Arkham, Games Radar reports.

The GCPD-centric show was to be set in “Year One” of Batman’s career and take place before the events in The Batman and build on the film’s examination of the anatomy of corruption in Gotham City. However, director Matt Reeves has opened up about the series’ shift to the legendary Arkham Asylum, home to many characters from Batman’s rogues’ gallery. Reeves said:

“The GCDP thing, that story has kind of evolved, we’ve actually now moving 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, again in their origins that you would – almost leaning into the idea of – it’s like a horror movie or a haunted house that is Arkham.” The idea of, again the way that Gotham is a character in the movie, I really want Arkham to exist as a character, so that 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, ‘Wait, we should really lean into this.’ And that’s kind of where that’s gone.”

Related: How ‘The Batman’ Sets Up the Penguin Spinoff Series

Arkham is a significant part of the Batman mythos, and many would agree that a series tackling its history and how it ties to Robert Pattinson‘s Caped Crusader would be an interesting premise to explore. With the series said to take place before The Batman during The Dark Knight’s first year as an active vigilante, this could be an indication that Gotham will be at its worst. Another spin-off focusing on Colin Farrell‘s Penguin is already in the works, which will trace Oswald Cobblepot’s rise through Gotham’s underworld. Of course, we spend such a short amount of time with Penguin in the film, but it’s enough to get the audience hooked on the potential of his story and his place among Gotham’s criminal underbelly and the pantheon of Batman’s villains. Dylan Clark, a producer on the series, described it as being akin to Scarface.

The Batman opened to the tune of $128.5 million domestically this weekend. That’s good for the second-biggest opening weekend since the pandemic began two years ago (trailing only Spider-Man: No Way Home). The Batman‘s domestic opening is easily the biggest of 2022 so far and is now the fifth-best March opening of all time.

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