The Penguin Gets Five-Minute Sneak Peek From HBO

The Penguin is "an extension of The Batman film" and sets up The Batman: Part II.

By Cameron Bonomolo

"People underestimate you, but not me," Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti) whispers to Oz (Colin Farrell) in a new extended trailer for The Penguin. "I've always known you were capable of more." One week after the death of Gotham gangster Carmine Falcone (played by John Turturro in 2022's The Batman), the recently-flooded streets of Gotham City are on the verge of a gang war. As Sofia and her brother, Alberto (Michael Zegen), seize the reins of their father's empire, Oz Cobb declares his takeover of the criminal cabal: "I'm gonna be the new kingpin of Gotham."

"What was very important was this idea of the high and the low, the idea of the parts of the city that are insulated. And then, the people who are struggling, just day to day, to get by," The Batman director and Penguin executive producer Matt Reeves says in the five-minute sneak peek, below. "The Penguin is really looking at the profound corruption of Gotham. It's a kind of a dark, American dream story, really."

Oz's rise to power pits the Falcone family capo against the "many gangs in Gotham, and they're all vying for real estate, and they're all vying for the drug trade," Farrell intones over footage of underboss Johnny Viti (Michael Kelly) and Nadia Maroni (Shohreh Aghdashloo), working on behalf of incarcerated mob boss Salvatore Maroni (Clancy Brown), head of the Maroni crime family.

"I thought about who should be a potential antagonist to Oz," adds showrunner Lauren LeFranc of Sofia, the heir to the Falcone empire. "Carmine knew that Sofia was the smartest. He wanted her to really carry on the family," Reeves says. "Dylan [Clark, executive producer] and I were very excited about how we could embody this rise to power of Oz in this battle of wills, and who is going to come out on top." 

"The world ain't set up for the honest man to succeed," Oz tells Victor Aguilar (Rhenzy Feliz), an ambitious teen he takes under his wing. "This should be a beautiful story with a happy ending, but that ain't the way the world works."

The waddling wannabe gangster "always struggled in his life," Farrell explains. "So he's savvy in some ways in relation to the cruel mathematics of how the world works." Adds LeFranc, "When I first started to dissect Oz and figure out what was driving him, my realization was, 'I think he wants to loved and revered.' To me, the deeper root issue would come from his mother." In the comics, Oswald Cobblepot's overbearing — and sometimes abusive, depending on the canon — mother is a key figure in his life. "I wanted to write an interesting, complicated, tough-as-nails broad, and so I created Francis for that," LeFranc says of mother Cobb (Deirdre O'Connell). 

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"The morally corrupt individual that is Oz, seeking ambition in the city, that was always sort of the blueprint for the character," Clark says. "And inside of that was an exploration that is deep, emotional, disturbing, and also exciting in an entertainment way, much like all the great gangster movies or television shows." In the way that The Godfather was among the influences on The Batman, the spinoff series is likened to Scarface or The Sopranos.

Because Oz's proto-Penguin had a small role in Reeves' first film, "There was ripe opportunity to really explore him in a deeper way," LeFranc says. "It's an extension of The Batman film," adds Farrell. "It's exploring a very different world. Whereas the Batman lived in the upper echelons of the social structure of Gotham, this is down in the gutter." As for Robert Pattinson's Dark Knight detective, Batman doesn't appear in The Penguin — but the eight-episode series sets up The Batman: Part II, which Warner Bros. has dated for October 2026.

The Penguin premieres Thursday, Sept. 19th on HBO and Max before moving to HBO Sundays starting Sept. 29th.

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