Colin Farrell’s Penguin Series Will Lay Essential Groundwork For ‘The Batman’ Sequel, According To Matt Reeves

For a brief moment, it looked like Colin Farrell’s The Penguin series for HBO Max was doomed to be a victim of the recent Warner Bros. Discovery merger. The studio was slashing projects left and right on a cost-cutting crusade, especially on the streaming side. However, things quickly took a turn when The Batman director Matt Reeves became the first filmmaker to sign a First Look deal with WBD. Now, The Penguin is not only safe, but according to a new interview with Reeves, it will be an essential building block for The Batman sequel.

Via Collider:

Reeves explains that “There’s actually a whole little fabric of things we’re wanting to do, the way we’re doing with [the] Penguin and how that comes back into how that will lead into the sequel, and what that sequel is going to be.” It sounds like the miniseries will set the foundations for The Batman sequel, which means that fans who want to fully understand Reeves’ BatVerse movies will have to watch all the spinoffs too.

This approach tracks with James Gunn‘s new tenure at DC Studios where he promised a more connected storytelling experience as WBD seeks to more closely follow the MCU’s template for a shared universe across TV and movies. But there’s an interesting caveat in the case of The Penguin. Both Gunn and Reeves have made it clear that the Robert Battinson-verse will remain separate from the DC Universe that Gunn is overseeing. There will still be more connected storytelling as Reeves builds out his own little Gotham universe, but as of this writing, Pattinson’s version of Batman won’t be gallivanting around with Superman or The Flash.

For now.