Matt Reeves is bringing us something very different and unique. His approach to Batman is very gritty & grounded. But what’s great is that he isn’t just building up Batman. He is actually developing a shared universe centered on Gotham City, through The Batman movies & the Gotham PD series on HBO Max. These projects will mingle and tell us the stories of several Batman-related characters. When Gotham PD was announced, people only had a vague idea of how it will connect to The Batman. And now, Matt Reeves has made everything clear as far as the connection is concerned.
The Batman will show us the tale of Gotham’s Dark Knight in his second year of crime fighting. It won’t be a typical origin story for him, but various elements of the film will surely touch upon his origin. As far as his first year is concerned, we will get to see glimpses of it through the eyes of Gotham PD. At the DC FanDome, Matt Reeves revealed that the Gotham PD series is a prequel story to The Batman. It will take us deep into the corrupt lands of Gotham right after Batman marks his first appearance. So basically, Gotham PD will deal with Batman’s Year One story, but not from Batman’s point of view.
Here’s what Matt Reeves iterated during The Batman panel:
“I mean, for me, the idea of the story was a story in which Gotham has that sort of depth of corruption, and then the idea that we could actually do a series that is going deeper into an aspect of it, which in this case is the corrupt police department and the inner workings of the city. And the way we’re going to do the series which is — I mean, Terence Winter is just like an incredible writer. So the idea that we got him to do this just is literally a dream. And the idea is we go back to Year One, and Year One is the beginning of the emergence and is the first appearance of this masked vigilante that starts to unsettle the city, and you start to see the story through the point of view of these corrupt cops and one in particular, and the story is actually a battle for his soul.
He’s an over-generalization and the history of corruption in Gotham is enormous and goes back many years as the story. It’s like as you realize that there’s this myth building in the background, you’re actually in a new place where you’ve never seen these characters before, some of which we’ll touch on what you may have seen from the comics, but others totally go down an avenue and go into detail that you couldn’t do in a movie and to go into these sort of rich places and meet entirely new characters that Terrence is going to be writing and I’m incredibly excited.”
You have to remember that this isn’t a Batman series. Instead, Jim Gordon & some other Gotham PD characters will get the spotlight. But still, we may get to see a few glimpses of Bruce Wayne or Batman here and there. Apart from direct cameos, maybe his Batmobile could show up once or twice. His sightings may be shown through news clips. The aftermath of his vigilantism would be seen. But mostly, the show will focus on building up the sections that won’t be explored in The Batman. Once this series builds up deeper corners of Gotham, The Batman sequels could then use them in their stories. The same would go for other characters. For instance, people like Harvey Dent or some other villains may not appear in the first Batman movie, but they could be brought in & developed through Gotham PD.
Matt Reeves will work along with the Boardwalk Empire creator Terence Winter, The Batman producer Dylan Clark, and Warner Bros. Television to create this show. Let’s see how things will go. The series might arrive in in 2022. Before that, The Batman hits theatres on October 1, 2021.
