HBO Max is ramping up its original series content in the coming months and years following successful early experiments with shows like “The Flight Attendant,” “Tokyo Vice” and “And Just Like That”.
Speaking with Variety, HBO Max’s head of originals Sarah Aubrey has offered updates on various titles in the works for the streamer – most notably the Matt Reeves “The Batman” series spin-off “The Penguin” starring Colin Farrell.
She confirms the project will begin just after the end of “The Batman” and before the events of the next film, adding “it’s fun for the audience to know that it will be a bridge between the two.”
Whilst she can’t say an actual release date yet, she dubs the show as being a grounded work “at that street level” of Gotham City as Colin Farrell’s Osward Copplepot gradually takes over the underworld:
“The goal of this is to show what Oz’s life is like, and that’s very much in the streets of Gotham, trying to get up and over as only the Penguin can. As a hustler and a strategist with his own ambitions.
It is a great example of having the time over eight episodes to tell a longer-arc character story with a lot of delicious twists and turns and new characters. It’s very much going to be about Gotham at that street level because he’s not flying around like Batman does. We are all embracing that as a very specific experience for audiences to have.”
Aubrey couldn’t go into any details of the second season of “Peacemaker” or other DC projects due to all that upheaval, but she has high hopes for the second season of “And Just Like That” which she dubs a ‘very joyful season’ that feels more like iconic episodes of “Sex and the City”.
As for a “Harry Potter” original TV series? “We don’t have a series in active development right now, but we are very much in that business because fans are just clamouring for more storytelling.”
