In James Gunn we trust (at least, most of us do), but he has quite the road ahead of him if he wants to square up with the DCU’s biggest comic film rival that isn’t the MCU. Indeed, Matt Reeves’ The Batman was far and away the best DC adaptation we got in 2022, and fans all over the world are waiting patiently to see where the filmmaker takes the franchise next.
We already know a bit about the next venture, which will be an HBO Max limited series titled The Penguin, in which Colin Farrell will reprise the eponymous character that he first portrayed in The Batman. The soon-to-be crime boss played a relatively minor role in the grand scheme of things, but that didn’t prevent Farrell from putting out a particularly eye-catching performance relative to his screentime.
In short, we have every reason to look forward to what the actor ends up doing with a majority of screentime, and Farrell himself is eagerly anticipating the opportunity. In an interview with Variety, he remarked that his limited appearance in The Batman only made him all the more hungry to sink his teeth into the character with the upcoming spinoff.
“The only thing I had an idea was that I wasn’t nearly getting to explore the character as much as I wanted to, and I just thought it was the tip of the iceberg, pardon the pun, that we were getting to do the six or seven scenes that we did in the film. I was grateful for them, but I wanted more.”
Spearheaded by showrunner Lauren LeFranc, The Penguin is set after the events of The Batman, and will follow the Penguin’s rise in Gotham City’s criminal underworld. Reeves has compared the essence of the show to the likes of Scarface, which indicates that the Gotham City mastermind has all the confidence in the world for this show.
