The era of Peak TV streaming has radically changed in the last few years. As we know, the pandemic compelled companies like Lucasfilm and Marvel to announce a rash of new series so Wall Street wouldn’t lose confidence in them. All other companies and streamers followed suit—the thinking being that with fewer theatrical movies available to consumers and Wall Street eyeing everything closely, a pivot to streaming content would say the day—including HBO and MAX. In this “need for content” era and the race to create streaming accessible content, Warner Bros. and HBO/MAX looked to Matt Reeves’ “Batman” franchise to see what spin-offs could be made. One was “The Penguin,” coming to MAX in September, and another was a Gotham PD series, which eventually got scrapped and changed into a spin-off series about Gotham’s famous “Arkham Asylum” facility for the criminally insane that housed Batman antagonists like the Joker and many more.
But this era is no longer, and when Wall Street suddenly rejected the valuation of streaming companies and Netflix’s stock plummeted in the Spring of 2022, that changed the game for everyone. The great streaming expansion soon became the great streaming contraction, and studios like Disney started to point back to cinemas as their saviors. So, while “The Penguin” got in under the wire since it was greenlit and shot a few years back, most projects from this era have been scrapped.
And so “Arkham Asylum” is no more. Initially conceived by Matt Reeves’ writer/director of “The Batman” film starring Robert Pattinson, between its evolution from a Gotham PD show to an “Arkham Asylum” set series, many creators were involved. But this most recent version was set to be created, written, and directed by indie auteur Antonio Campos, known for celebrated arthouse indies like “Simon Killer” (2012), “Christine” (2016), and “The Devil All the Time” (2020) and creating the MAX biographical crime series “The Staircase” (2022) which undoubtedly led to this ‘Batman’ spin-off gig.
While Variety, which broke the news, said sources tell them a new project set within the infamous Gotham City asylum could still be developed in the future, given that this aforementioned era is over, that feels like wishful thinking.
Moreover, the James Gunn-led DC Studios doesn’t seem too open to anything developed beforehand or without some of his or co-CEO Peter Safran’s say. When Gunn took over DC Studios, he effectively scrapped all of the DC Extended Universe projects from the Zack Snyder era and decided to start over.
The only projects allowed to remain were Gunn’s own, “Peacemaker,” elements of his ‘Suicide Squad’ movie and an “Amanda Waller” series (another ‘Suicide Squad’ character), and the DC Elseworlds projects—aka stories that take place outside the new DC Studios continuity—like Reeves’ “Batman” universe and Todd Phillips’ “Joker”-verse.
Though, to be fair, Gunn was always publicly favorable to Reeves and what he had created.
It’s unclear what Campos’ version of the show would entail, but Reeves’ first “Batman” film depicted Arkham Asylum at various points in the movie, in the end, featuring incarcerated criminals like The Riddler (Paul Dano) and a brief appearance by the Joker (Barry Keoghan). Presumably, the show wouldn’t feature either of these actors as regular players in the story, but surely cameos from each would have been desired.
In a 2022 interview, when Reeves first revealed the Gotham PD show had changed, he said the series had “started to evolve” into this Arkham Asylum show, which he described as being like a “horror movie or a haunted house that is Arkham.” Campos would come on board as the new showrunner about eight months later.
It’s also possible WB and MAX never really knew what they wanted from the series. Its original incarnations, when it was more Gotham PD driven, were being developed by Terrence Winter (“Boardwalk Empire”) and “Giri/Haji” creator Joe Barton, but HBO eventually parted ways with both of them.
Personally, it feels like even the Elseworlds movies are coming to a close as DC Studios seems to overtake everything else. It would not surprise us to hear that “The Batman Part II,” originally conceived as a trilogy, just ends after the second film, due in October 2026, but who knows? Still, “The Penguin,” starring Colin Farrell, arrives in September, and that’s at least something.