While the announcement of The Batman's new spin-off, dedicated to Colin Farrell's Penguin is an exciting validation of how great the character looks, it rather pushes the movie into the same MCU copycat trap the original DCEU fell into. In effect, it means looking too far to the future when the primary focus should be on telling the best stories for now. Unfortunately, because of the success built on the back of the MCU's remarkable, sprawling shared universe, it's inevitable that the same broader scope would impact Warner Bros' DC movie plans again.
The MCU wasn't the first franchise to invent the idea of a shared universe, but it did represent a notable paradigm shift in blockbuster film-making. In a market already heavily dominated by sequels and powerhouse IP brands, Marvel Studios walked eyes-open into a model that could guarantee audience engagement for decades, with the obvious financial benefits of such established fandom. Making Iron Man didn't just mean getting to make Iron Man 2 a couple of years later, it meant being able to count on the brand factor Iron Man would still have on the individual movies potentially setting up Avengers 5 a decade later. Marvel Studios knew the potential for a successful MCU shared universe but not the reality, but they still nailed it and set off an inevitable superhero movie arms race that DC were always going to fall in line with.
Sadly, the DCEU got the MCU model wrong, running towards Justice League too quickly and forcing a reset in the wake of Joss Whedon's disastrous Justice League cut that still hasn't fully been resolved. The lessons were tough ones, including the idea of being too focused on the future, and it already feels like the same mistakes are being made with Matt Reeves' The Batman, thanks to the Penguin spin-off TV show. There is already one approved The Batman spin-off, with focus turning to Gotham's police department, and while seeing more of Reeves' universe is very welcome, promising more before Robert Pattinson's Dark Knight even debuts risks the same old DCEU copycat shared universe problem.
The pressure on Warner Bros to consolidate the brand of The Batman is understandable, and the suggestion of a Colin Farrell starring Penguin spin-off is exciting in its own regard, of course, but why now? One of the great successes of Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy was that it was a self-contained story, partly by design and partly because of the context of its release: the idea of him greenlighting a Scarecrow spin-off before Batman Begins released would be almost laughable. There is a certain level of sanctity of story that is compromised by revealing the next step of it, and it is - ironically - a mistake that the MCU repeats with almost every movie now. Certainly in their post-credits obsession. Not everything has to be a set-up for the next thing: not everything needs to have satellite stories already in place mapping out to the audience that the character in question will make it out of the primary movie. There is now no mystery over the fate of Farrell's Penguin.
Worse still, dragging Penguin out of The Batman's universe for his own spin-off makes him returning for a sequel unlikely, at least from the outset. Spin-offs very rarely become parts of the whole again (unless we're talking Family Guy and Cleveland, of course). Instead, it's hard to ignore the assumption now that The Batman 2, which is inevitable but not firmly announced, crucially, will move on from him, in order to preserve the reason why Robert Pattinson's Batman won't appear in The Penguin's show. After all, it's a spin-off, not a sequel that shifts character focus. And then there's the question of why there's a GCPD show separate from one about Gotham's crime lord, as suggested by The Batman's marketing. None of these are questions that really need to be answered at this stage, when the focus should be on making sure The Batman lands as it ought to. Let's just hope it doesn't suggest that Warner Bros are too tempted by the golden promise of an imagined MCU-like future too much to see what's in front of them.
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