The Batman has finally hit theaters, and the response has been pretty big. It has already grossed over $300 million, and has no sign of slowing down. We knew that a Penguin spinoff show starring Collin Farrell was on it’s way to HBO Max. After the success of Peacemaker, the series is set to be rated R. The Batman director Matt Reeves compared the series to The Long Good Friday and Scarface, with it charting Penguin’s rise to power in Gotham’s criminal underworld following the events of the film, it would come before a sequel to The Batman.

There was also a plan for show focusing on the Gotham City Police Department from The Batman. The series would have been a police procedural centered, with Terence Winter set to write and serve as showrunner. Reeves, Winter, Dylan Clark, Daniel Pipski, and Adam Kassan were executive producing the untitled series. At the virtual DC FanDome event in August 2020, Reeves said the series would be a prequel to The Batman, taking place during the first year of Batman’s career and focusing on the corruption in Gotham and the GCPD. He said the series would be told from the perspective of one particular crooked cop, with the story being a “battle for his soul”, taking inspiration from Prince of the City.

The idea of a GCPD Police Procedural had me very excited. It is what I had been hoping for with Gotham, which aired on Fox from 2014 through 2019. That show ultimately had it’s issues, and was not what it was originally set to be. This GCPD show sounded like it would finally give us that show. Unfortunately it was not to be.

The GCPD show has been altered to become a show focusing on Arkham Asylum. Matt Reeves spoke about the project saying:

The GCDP thing, that story has kind of evolved, we’ve actually now moving more into the realm of exactly what would happen in the world of Arkham as it relates coming off of our movie, and some of the characters, again in their origins that you would – almost leaning into the idea of – it’s like a horror movie or a haunted house that is Arkham.” The idea of, again the way that Gotham is a character in the movie, I really want Arkham to exist as a character, so that you go into this environment and encounter these characters in a way that feels really fresh. And so in our work on Gotham, that story started to evolve, and it started feeling, ‘Wait, we should really lean into this.’ And that’s kind of where that’s gone.

Honestly this sounds like it is once again going the way of Gotham. Leaning on the mythos of Batman, and his villains, rather then the regular cops in a city dealing with the threats, and a crazed vigilante out there. Hopefully they find away not to rely solely on the Batman IP and can make us care about the characters, and the stories.