FOR SOME REASON, the film and television superhero boom of the last decade or so has created a micro-trend of its own: spin-offs focused on supporting comic book characters without their accompanying hero protagonists anywhere in sight. Many of these have turned out disastrously—we’re looking at you, Morbius, Madame Web, and probably the upcoming Kraven The Hunter—while stuff like the Venom films have at least turned out to be fun in a campy, silly kind of way. DC’s latest take on this, though, has been a major home run, as HBO’s The Penguin is turning out to be one of the year’s very best shows.
Perhaps that’s due to the fact that the lack of Batman—at least in the earlygoing—isn’t due to any kind of tricky rights situation, or another behind-the-scenes Hollywood issue; The Penguin is focused on Oz “The Penguin” Cobb (Colin Farrell) because his rags-to-riches crime story is specifically the story being told. Adding a caped crusader into the mix would significantly distract from the saga unfolding between Oz and Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti), with Oz’s young apprentice Vic (Rhenzy Feliz) on the outskirts.
But this is, still, a story set in the Gotham City world of Matt Reeves’s fantastic 2022 film The Batman; characters we’ve met already like Batman (Pattinson), The Riddler (Paul Dano), and Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz) still exist. What they did really happened, really matters, and we really feel the aftermath of it; in the opening of the show’s third episode, we really feel the pain and damage cause when Riddler flooded the city (especially from Vic’s perspective). Hell, the whole show of The Penguin is about the aftermath of Carmine Falcone’s (John Turturro, and, now, Mark Strong) death. The show may not include these characters, but the world certainly does.
And so it certainly is fair to wonder whether we’ll see Batman in The Penguin. For anyone wondering how things shake out, luckily, we have a definitive answer—or, well, we think we do, at least.
Will Robert Pattinson’s Batman be in HBO’s The Penguin?
The Penguin showrunner Lauren LeFranc seemed to pretty definitively rule out an appearance from Batman in The Penguin during a pre-season interview with SFX magazine.
“I understand why people’s desire would be to have Batman, or to think that unless Batman’s in a show or a film then it doesn’t have the same punch,” she said. “I think it packs a different punch. Matt’s films are through the lens of the Batman, so you’re high up, looking down on the city. It’s a different perspective. With Oz, you’re in the city streets, you’re in the grit and the muck and the grime. He’s looking up, wanting to claw his way to the top.”
As we mentioned above, despite the fact that Robert Pattinson as Batman and Paul Dano as The Riddler aren’t seen in the show, you’re still very much feeling their impact in The Penguin and how things in Oz’s world are playing out.
“You’re going down a different alley. So the spectre of Batman is there,” Matt Reeves said in the same SFX interview. “The spectre of the Riddler is there. The spectre of everything that happens in the last movie is there. It informs it. And it’s exactly where we begin.”
