The Batman Proves We Need a Catwoman Spinoff

The Batman skyrocketed into theaters this past weekend, breaking records and delighting fans in the first days of its debut. The film has introduced an entirely new take on the DC Comics mythos, with characters and concepts that are proving to only be the tip of the iceberg with regards to storytelling. At the moment, there are two projects already confirmed to be spinning out of the events of the film — a sequel series following Oswald Cobblepot (Colin Farrell), and a prequel series focused around Arkham Asylum. Still, the events of the film could have perfectly set up another spinoff entirely — a potential movie or HBO Max series surrounding Selina Kyle / Catwoman (Zoe Kravitz). Spoilers for The Batman lurk below! Only look if you want to know!

In and amongst the psychological fight between Bruce Wayne / Batman (Robert Pattinson) and Edward Nashton / The Riddler (Paul Dano), The Batman managed to cover a surprising amount of Selina’s story. We met her as she was working undercover at both the Iceberg Lounge and its secret club, the 44 Below — both to protect her friend and possible girlfriend, Annika Kosolov (Hana Hrzic), and to hopefully get back the money she feels she’s owed from her birth father, Carmine Falcone (John Turturro).

Over the course of the film, as Selina and Batman grow closer, Annika is killed by Falcone because she knows too much about his criminal conspiracy with the Gotham Renewal project, which only further incentivizes her to get her revenge on Falcone — and maybe even kill him. Selina goes to do so but is stopped by Batman, who doesn’t want her to be haunted by the trauma of killing her father, and Falcone ultimately dies minutes later after being sniped by The Riddler. After helping Batman in fighting off the radicalized followers of The Riddler, Selina decides to leave Gotham and be a vigilante upstate, possibly in Bludhaven. She invites Batman to go with her, but realizes that he’s too closely tied to Gotham to leave, and they part ways.

It’s safe to assume that, once a The Batman sequel comes to fruition, Kravitz’s Selina will be part of those proceedings, both given Catwoman’s close tie to Batman’s lore, and the positive response to her portrayal. But in the meantime, there’s more than enough narrative real estate to explore what happens to Selina between those two films, as evident by the countless Catwoman comic runs that have popped up over the years. Whether she sets up shop in Bludhaven or somewhere else entirely, and whether she operates as a hero or antihero, Selina can undoubtedly hold a story and a supporting cast all her own, while also expanding out the larger mythos of The Batman along the way.

So, what could a potential Catwoman spinoff draw from? There’s the Ed Brubaker and Darwyn Cooke Catwoman solo run of the early 2000s, which saw her operating as a more truly heroic character, all while avoiding the investigations of private eye Slam Bradley. There’s also Cooke’s 2002 graphic novel Selina’s Big Score, in which she orchestrates a seemingly-impossible, globe-trotting heist involving Slam and a few other characters. There’s even the most recent ongoing run of Catwoman, which has seen her (thus far) take down a crime family in California, galvanize a group of street kids in one of Gotham’s forgotten neighborhoods, and go toe-to-toe with a number of criminal kingpins. Either way, these stories only scratch the surface of what kind of stories a Catwoman spinoff could tell. 

The Batman is now playing exclusively in theaters.