Gotham Pilot Director Danny Cannon Admits It Was “Daunting” To Follow Nolan

The series is an origin story for a number of characters, with younger versions of Batman, Poison Ivy, Catwoman, The Riddler and The Penguin appearing on posters. More than that, it’s arguably the origin story of Gotham itself, giving fans a sense of just how it got to be so bad that it needed a Batman.

Since Gotham was a character unto itself in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, there has been (and surely will be again, once more people have seen the pilot when it screens at Comic Con International: San Diego later this month) a lot of discussion about the importance of the first post-Nolan foray into the city.

Judge Dredd director Danny Cannon, who helmed the pilot for Gotham, was keenly aware of it going in.

“It was daunting at first, because you’re following three masterpieces,” he told IGN in a recent interview. “So I settled with the fact that — what we talked about when we first pitched this was, ’20 years before Batman.’ A world that’s starting to see a corrupt city rotting from the inside. It reminded us of New York in the late ’70s and early ’80s. That was our first meeting, and we kind of spring-boarded off of that. Luckily, that’s uncharted territory. Hopefully in the atmospherics of Gotham we created a romantic, gothic, Dickensian kind of world.”

Gotham will air Monday nights in the fall on FOX. No specific premiere date has yet been set. The pilot will screen at Comic Con International and it’s likely fans will learn the airdate at that time.