Colin Farrell dishes juicy new details on ‘The Penguin’ spinoff series

The DC hype train continues to plow ahead at full speed, with everyone from the longtime survivors to converted SnyderVerse worshipers and fresh newcomers still riding the wave left by the recent slate reveal from James Gunn and Peter Safran.

Among the biggest pieces of news in that announcement was the title and release date for The Batman – Part II, the sequel to Matt Reeves’ 2022 film and the first film in the Reevesverse, a Batman-centric continuity of content dreamed up by the filmmaker that will serve as an Elseworlds project under the collective DC Universe banner.

With the Reevesverse being a big part of the DCU conversation, actor Colin Farrell was all too happy to chime in with even more good news, revealing in an interview with Variety that the upcoming HBO Max series The Penguin, which follows the events of The Batman, will run for eight episodes, and that he and the rest of the creative team have every intention on gunning for a follow-up project, which would likely entail brand new show or film since HBO Max picked the project up as a limited series

“It’s going to be an eight-part thing. Around Oz’s rise to power, filling that power vacuum created when Falcone was killed. Matt’s idea was to have the Penguin show begin about a week after the end of the Batman film. And if it works, if the trajectory is interesting, and the audience goes for it, and we do our jobs right, the second Penguin feature will pick up where the HBO show will end.”

Farrell first brought his magnetic depth to the role of the Penguin in The Batman, and will be reprising the role for the HBO Max series, prosthetic nose and all. This wasn’t quite the same Oswald Cobblepot that DC Comics fans may have been used to seeing, with The Batman depicting an iteration of the character before he climbed Gotham’s criminal underworld ladder. As mentioned by Farrell above, The Penguin will observe such a climb.

It’s a good week for the Reevesverse; we’ve got a title and release date to the original film’s sequel, and some solid updates for its most highly anticipated spinoff. All we need now is a longer glimpse at Barry Keoghan’s Joker and we’ll call it a perfect sequence of events.