The Penguin Might Not Be the Villain in The Batman Part II — and the Comics Explain Why

[Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Penguin episode 8, “A Great or Little Thing.”] The Penguin finale ended with Oz Cobb (Colin Farrell) on top of the world. After he outmaneuvered Sofia Gigante (Cristin Milioti) and took out what was left of the newly-merged Falcone-Maroni crime families with the death of Sal Maroni (Clancy Brown), Oz and right-hand man Vic (Rhenzy Feliz) staged a coup against Gotham’s gangs to seize control of the underworld. While a tuxedo-clad Oz cemented himself as a villain — and the new kingpin of Gotham City — the final shot of the Bat-Signal lighting up the sky over his penthouse suite might not be for the Penguin.

“I haven’t even read a script yet,” Farrell told The Hollywood Reporter about Penguin’s return in Matt Reeves’ The Batman Part II. Reeves has described the eight-episode series as a bridge to the Robert Pattinson-fronted Batman sequel slated for Oct. 2, 2026, but the Penguin only has a few scenes in the next chapter of the Batman Epic Crime Saga.

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“I certainly don’t expect anything. I signed up for three Batman films, but I didn’t know if I’d be in the second film,” he said. “Matt Reeves is a brilliant writer and an extraordinary filmmaker, and what I’m most excited-slash-nervous about in the second film is not what Oz does — or what predicaments he finds himself in, or what moments of success he gets to experience — but what his voice is.”

“How is his personality? It was forming and changing in the limited series, and, by the end of the eight episodes, it’s concretized into something else,” Farrell continued of Oz cutting all ties after realizing that family is a weakness. After strangling Vic to death and molding his lover Eve Karlo (Carmen Ejogo) into the spitting image of his catatonic mother, Francis (Deirdre O’Connell), Oz made it so that he — and he alone — is the new king of Gotham.

“There is a degree of almost delusion psychopathy present in the last scene. So how is that taken up in the second film? I was told I have five or six scenes,” Farrell said. “I don’t have any hopes or any expectations. I’m really an open book, and that’s the way I get excited by sh-t or not. I think sometimes actors, if they have a career that has a certain length of time, they sometimes get to make too many decisions. Which isn’t to say I won’t push back or argue or fight in Oz’s corner — I do believe I know him better than anyone now.”

Oz had Sofia recommitted to Arkham State Hospital by cutting a deal with corrupt city Councilman Sebastian Hady (Rhys Coiro) and pinning everything on the last-surviving Gigante: the Crown Point bombing, the Bliss drug operation, and the Falcone-Maroni gang war that raged across Gotham in the weeks after the Riddler (Paul Dano) terrorized and flooded the city.

With Mayor-Elect Bella Reál (Jayme Lawson) forming an anti-corruption commission to root out corrupt cops and city officials, Oz leveraged his dirty dealings into legitimacy to be welcome among the Gotham elite. Meanwhile, Sofia received a letter from her half-sister: Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz), a.k.a. Catwoman, who already carried out her vendetta against their father, Carmine Falcone (John Turturro), in The Batman movie. Might this suggest a Selina-Sofia alliance in The Batman Part II?

“We’re leaving Oz and [Gotham] in a state where the city is still trying to heal itself from what happened,” Reeves explained to EW. “It’s also a time, as you see [with] what goes on with Vic and Crown Point, where the city’s deeply wounded. As we’re entering the movie, all of that stuff is still broiling. The repercussions of what happened as a result of the last movie and what’s happened during this gang war are very much the table setter for the way we enter into [The Batman Part II].”

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Now that Oz has established himself as an informant and credited Councilman Hady with ending the decades-long drug war between the Falcones and the Maronis, he’s positioned to take a role that Oswald Cobblepot has filled in comics like Penguin: Pain and Prejudice and Tom King’s The Penguin series.

What the Comics Could Reveal About The Penguin’s Role in The Batman 2

In Penguin: Pain and Prejudice — which inspired young Oz’s origin story in The Batman universe — the Penguin is the rich and powerful proprietor of the Iceberg Lounge whose heists are a means of caring for his catatonic mother, Esther. That series depicts Oswald as the biggest fence in Gotham City who operates under the watchful eye of Batman, but only when Penguin plots an act of terror is the Dark Knight able to have him arrested.

The 12-issue Penguin comic revealed Oswald was a bartender at the Iceberg Lounge owned by mob boss Carmine Falcone and came to resent the Falcone Family’s mockery. Oswald, depicting himself as someone “scrapping for scraps” and desiring respect and money, became an informant for a nascent Batman to undermine Falcone’s criminal operations.

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Batman made an arrangement: give up the Falcones and he’d allow Oswald to run the club on the condition he rats out the Iceberg Lounge’s criminal clientele. At first, Oswald sold out wanted men who visited Gotham and stopped at the Iceberg Lounge for a drink. Eventually, Batman got Oswald to give up Falcone shipments of stolen goods and drugs, and using this bartered intel, Batman systematically dismantled Falcone’s crime empire, including a human trafficking ring. Batman’s investigation into Oswald uncovered an orphan scrapping for scraps who cared for his “mother,” Fran, and so Batman taught Oswald how to best extract information from criminals without exposing his cover. That went on for a year — until Oswald killed Fran by pushing her off a roof and took over the remnants of the old Falcone empire.

After Batman targeted Don Falcone himself, and Oswald found himself in a territorial dispute with the Bertenellis gang, Oswald professed innocence because he keeps his hands clean. “As always, he’s as clean as he says he is. He’s lying. What’s more, he knows that I know he’s lying,” the Dark Knight detective deduced in Penguin #7. “It’s a game he likes to play, and I let him play it. But in the end, he’s as corrupt as I allow him to be. He knows this as well as I do. All the rest is farce.”

As Oswald consolidated his power, he eventually donned a top hat, monocle, and an umbrella — adopting “a theme and a scheme” like the colorfully-clad rogues Joker and the Riddler. Oswald Cobblepot then gave Gotham City a new villain to ruffle the Batman’s feathers: the Penguin.