The Arkham Asylum series that The Batman director Matt Reeves is currently developing will be set in James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DCU.
Per Deadline, Gunn responded to a post on Threads asking if Reeves is working on any other DC projects apart from The Batman – Part II, The Penguin, and the untitled Arkham Asylum spin-off series. Gunn confirmed those were the only titles that Reeves is currently attached to; however, he revealed that the Arkham series will be set in the upcoming DCU.
“Yes,” he confirmed when asked for further clarification. “We love Matt as a director and producer so he’ll be producing stories both within his The Batman universe and within the DCU.”
What is Matt Reeves’ Arkham series?
Reeves’ Arkham series was announced in March 2022. He said, per Variety, at the time, “We’ve actually now [moved] more into the realm of exactly what would happen in the world of Arkham as it relates coming off of our movie and some of the characters and their origins… almost leaning into the idea of… it’s like a horror movie or a haunted house that is Arkham. The idea, again the way that Gotham is a character in the movie, I really want Arkham to exist as a character. You go into this environment and encounter these characters in a way that feels really fresh. And so in our work on Gotham, that story started to evolve, and it started feeling [like], ‘Wait, we should really lean into this.’ And then that’s kinda where that’s gone.”
While Reeves’ comments appear to indicate the Arkham series would be directly tied to The Batman (which exists in a separate continuity than the upcoming DCU, which begins in 2024 with the animated Creature Commandos series), Gunn said the series “wasn’t changed” and was always intended to be part of his and Safran’s universe from the start.
“It was one of the first pitches we bought when Peter and I came onboard,” Gunn (who was appointed as co-CEO and co-chairman of DC Studios with Safran in October 2022) said. “I don’t know the permutations it went through before that time.”
