The Batman: HBO Max Gotham PD TV Series is a Prequel

Matt Reeves gives great interviews under ordinary circumstances, but at his DC Fandome panel for The Batman he gave us a whole lot to chew on including some new details about his recently announced Gotham PD set series on HBO Max.

According to the writer/director the show will be set during “Year One” of Batman’s career which makes it a prequel to the highly-anticipated movie which takes place during”Year Two.” That would have been a big reveal in itself but Reeves had more to say about the upcoming TV series.

So what was it that excited Reeves about potentially expanding his vision of Gotham?

“The idea of this story in which Gotham has this sort of depth of corruption,” he explained. “And then the idea that we could do a series that would go deeper into an aspect of it, which in this case is the corrupt police department and the corrupt inner workings of the city.”

The director was also full of praise for his collaborator Terence Winter. “Terence is just an incredible writer and the idea that we got to do this was literally a dream.” 

If you’re not immediately familiar with the term “Year One” then Reeves gave a little more context for that too.

“It’s the beginning of the emergence,” he said. “It’s the first appearance of this masked vigilante that starts to unsettle the city. You start to see the story through the point of view of these corrupt cops, and one in particular the story is actually a battle for his soul. He’s a cop over generations.”

Reeves also expanded on what we can expect from the noir-ish cop story as well as revealing it will include entirely new characters.

“The history of corruption in Gotham goes back years and the story is, as you realize there’s this myth building in the background, you’re actually in a new place where you’ve never seen these characters before, some of which we’ll touch on that you may have seen from the comics, but others are totally new. You can go down an avenue and go into detail that you couldn’t do in a movie and go into these sort of rich places and meet these entirely new characters that Terence is going to create.” 

It’s rare to get so much in depth information from a director who has yet to even shoot half of his movie but it’s clear just how much passion and excitement Reeves has for The Batman and its spinoff which leads to incredible answers like these and a whole bunch of awesome news