The Batman HBO Max Spinoff Gotham PD Showrunner Addresses Comparison to FOX’s Gotham

Last summer, HBO Max announced that a Gotham PD spinoff series would be coming to the streamer with the series set in the world created in The Batman by director Matt Reeves. With that world specifically being very early in Batman’s story, many couldn’t help but wonder how similar to Fox’s Gotham the upcoming series would be as that series was also set early in the Batman story, though Gotham functioned as a prequel and offered the origin stories of many characters central to the Batman mythos. Now, the showrunner for HBO Max’s Gotham PD Joe Barton is addressing the comparison between the two series.

On Twitter, Barton was asked how different Gotham PD will be as compared to Gotham and while Barton offered no specific details, he did have a very direct answer: “very different”.

Gotham ran for five seasons on Fox and began with James Gordon (Ben McKenzie) and his partner Harvey Bullock (Donal Logue) working to solve the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents in Season 1 and evolves over the seasons to include Bruce’s (David Mazouz) story and ultimately the origin of Batman and his rogues gallery.

When it comes to Gotham PD, generally speaking, we don’t have a lot of details about that series at this point with the majority of what has been revealed about the series coming from Reeves during last summer’s DC FanDome event.

“The idea of the story was a story in which Gotham has that sort of depth of corruption, and then the idea that we could actually do a series that is going deeper into an aspect of it, which in this case is the corrupt police department and the inner workings of the city,” Reeves said. “The idea is we go back to Year One, and Year One is the beginning of the emergence and is the first appearance of this masked vigilante that starts to unsettle the city, and you start to see the story through the point of view of these corrupt cops and one in particular, and the story is actually a battle for his soul.”

Reeves also said that there will be brand-new characters in the series as well as characters that are more familiar that viewers will get into more detail with.

“It’s like as you realize that there’s this myth-building in the background, you’re actually in a new place where you’ve never seen these characters before — some of which we’ll touch on what you may have seen from the comics — but others totally go down an avenue and go into detail that you couldn’t do in a movie and to go into these sort of rich places,” Reeves said.

Are you looking forward to HBO Max’s Gotham PD? Let us know in the comments.