Colin Farrell Says The Penguin TV Series Should Start Shooting In Early 2023, Sweetheart

Holy god, what are you showing me?! A news update about "The Penguin"? Come on!

Yes, Colin Farrell's Oswald "Oz" Cobblepot and his great big face are getting their own HBO Max TV series from "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." writer and producer Lauren LeFranc. The show was announced shortly after Matt Reeves' "The Batman" arrived in theaters, introducing Robert Pattinson as a youthful Batman who finds himself playing a cat-and-mouse game with Paul Dano's "Se7en"-esque iteration of the Riddler. Farrell appeared in a minor antagonist role, but he certainly made his mark. He even got to mock Batman's Spanish grammar.

The DC Universe (they dropped the "Extended") has been a bit up in the air since "The Suicide Squad" director James Gunn and producer Peter Safran were made co-CEOs of DC Studios, with reports suggesting that the pair intend to wipe at least some parts of the slate clean. However, the most recent dispatch by The Hollywood Reporter indicated that Reeves' upcoming sequel to "The Batman" is probably safe, as is "The Penguin." 

Now we have an update from the horse's mouth (or rather, the Penguin's beak). Speaking to Jamie Lee Curtis in an "Actors on Actors" interview for Variety, Farrell was asked about his turn as the Penguin in "The Batman" and his plans to return to the role. "I did it in the film, I did like six scenes," he said. "I am going to do it [for television], I hope I'm going to do it, yeah. In February or March."

This isn't the first time in recent memory that we've had a gritty street-level crime drama about Gotham City, though Fox's "Gotham" got off the "gritty" rails and jumped onto the "goofy" tracks pretty quickly (by the third episode of season 1, Jim Gordon had to track down a villain who was tying Gotham citizens to weather balloons so that they went floating off into the sky). Around the same time that "The Penguin" was announced, we learned that another in-development tie-in show for "The Batman," "Gotham PD," had been put on hold indefinitely. Matt Reeves explained that the plan had "evolved" to focus more on Arkham Asylum, Gotham's house of horrors, and also offered some insight into the origins of the Penguin TV show:

"I thought that there was a story in the wake of what happens at the end of ['The Batman'], where there's a power vacuum. And that's why, right now, you see Oz at the end of the movie looking out over the city, standing in Falcone's office, and thinking 'OK.' The idea there was that he has been underestimated by everyone, but he knows. So I said 'I kinda see like an American Dream, Scarface Gotham story. Like Tony Montana, no one thinks this guy can be anything, and he has a brutal desire to prove everyone wrong.'"

Given the mammoth success of "Joker," it's easy to see why Warner Bros. has pivoted to this focus on villains. Farrell doesn't sound 100% certain about the fate of "The Penguin" (presumably, like a lot of people connected to the DC Universe, he's waiting for an update himself). But assuming that "The Penguin" has a similar schedule to "Peacemaker," a shooting start in February or March 2023 would point to an early 2024 premiere on HBO Max.