HBO’s The Penguin, starring an unrecognizable Colin Farrell, is the first series thusfar spun off from Matt Reeves’s live-action smash hit The Batman.
Plans are still a little murky as to how Earth-Reeves fits in, or doesn’t, with James Gunn’s wholesale relaunch of the DCEU movieverse—beginning with Gunn’s Superman, slated to appear in 2025—but The Penguin seems to have much the same vibe as The Batman: grim, gritty and, as a producer recently put it, “grounded.”
For eye-rolling example: In the comics, the Penguin’s real name is “Oswald Cobblepot.” In The Penguin, Mr. Farrell is playing a man named…Oz Cobb.
To wit: in a recent interview with SFX Magazine, producer Dylan Clark said DC Comics president and chief creative officer Jim Lee signed off on the change. “Matt asked, ‘Can I call our character Oz Cobb?’ And Jim said, ‘Absolutely!’ So we got a blessing from the king himself. That small change of the name allowed us to look at this character in a grounded way.”
“It felt like in the Gotham City that Matt created in his film, Cobblepott seemed less of a real person in the way that Cobb is a real last name,” writer and showrunner Lauren LeFranc added. “He’s a gangster and it just kind of felt more correct.”
(Insert GIF of someone pinching the bridge of their nose here.)
Let’s start with the basics: The Penguin was introduced as foil for the Darknight Detective back in 1941, a time when comic books were aimed at actual eight-year olds. He was a rotund fellow in a top hat and tails and often carried a trick umbrella.
Unlike the Joker or Two-Face or Hugo Strange, all of whom were presented as crazy, or the Catwoman, whose thievery was coded as almost compulsive and whose complex relationship with the Batman could turn the characters into adventurers-in-love, the Penguin was an above-average gangster with a theme. (As someone on Twitter once opined, Spider-Man villains are STEM kids, whereas Batman villains are theater kids.)
