Close to a year after a teaser was dropped for Matt Reeves’ The Batman spinoff series The Penguin for Max, we finally get the trailer and with a fall premiere date.
Far from being portrayed as a comical oddball a la Danny DeVito’s take on the DC villain in the Tim Burton movies, here we savor Colin Farrell’s Oswald Cobblepot as a Tony Soprano-type, given his big philosophical proclamations and tall tales of yore. It’s clear, in a great nod, that this Penguin is paying absolute homage to HBO’s alpha-male multi-Emmy-winning mafia series.
“When I was a kid, there was a gangster, real old-school type — Rex Calabrese; he was a big deal. He helped people. He saw you on the street, he’d call out to you,” Farrell’s Penguin regales.
“When I’m 14, he has a heart attack and dies still holdin’ a cigar” says Penguin. “In my neighborhood, they throw a parade in his honor. A friggin’ parade. And it wasn’t fancy, but it was the gesture. The show of love, of what he meant. Can you imagine to be remembered like that?”
Farrell reprises his Batman villain in this eight-episode DC Studios drama series that continues The Batman epic crime saga. Reeves’ Warner Bros. DC movie grossed over $772.2 million worldwide, netted $177M in profit and was one of the most-watched movies on the Max streaming service.
Similar to the motif set up by Reeves in his movie, it’s early-days Penguin here: He’s not the tuxedo-clad lord we know from the 1960s Batman TV series or even the Fox reboot Gotham, in which the bad guy was played by Robert Lord Taylor, rather a leather coat-wearing, gun-toting guy on the street making his hits.
DC co-Chiefs Peter Safran and James Gunn have said that Reeves’ Batman is part of an else-verse, which is not part of Phase One of their “Gods and Monsters” DC universe (which kicks off with the July 11, 2025, theatrical release of Superman). Reeves’ feature sequel, The Batman II, hits cinemas on October 2, 2026. Safran and Gunn have their own Batman in the works, The Brave and the Bold, which follows Bruce Wayne and the spitfire, renegade son he didn’t know he had: Damien Wayne, who takes on the alias of Robin.