HBO Max is making a new spin-off TV series from upcoming movie The Batman, set in the same universe as the 2021 film and with the involvement of director Matt Reeves. The untitled show will focus on the Gotham City police department, and will follow the movie's lead of exploring corruption within the city.
Writer Terence Winter is behind the show, and he previously created Boardwalk Empire, a solid HBO drama that doesn't quite rank among classics like The Sopranos and The Wire. He also co-created the one-season-and-done HBO series Vinyl, and wrote the screenplay for The Wolf of Wall Street.
If you're sitting there thinking, 'hang on! Wasn't there already a TV series about the cops in Gotham City?', you're right. Gotham, which finished airing its final season last year, was a Batman prequel series that ended up bringing in a lot of villains from the comic books. That was a campy show in a lot of ways. The new series, on the other hand, sounds like it's trying to be thematically complex.
As mentioned, the show will take place in the upcoming movie's universe, and 'further explore' the characters of Gotham. The most likely candidate to reprise their role in this series, we expect, would be Jeffrey Wright, who will play police Commissioner Gordon in the new movie.
HBO Max is currently only available in the US, though by the time the series is ready, we expect the service will either have launched in more locations, or the show will be licensed to a local broadcaster.
The Batman is released in October 2021, so expect to see the show at some point after that.
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A Batman Universe is in the works
The most tantalizing element of the announcement is that this show is "ultimately launching a new Batman universe across multiple platforms". That suggests more movies, series or even games could be in the works that'll tie in to The Batman, though Warner Bros doesn't elaborate on what the specifics of that universe will look like.
This movie, then, sounds like it'll sit firmly apart from whatever's going on in the DC Extended Universe, and build this specific vision of Batman's world into a shared backdrop across different stories.
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