James Gunn Reveals Matt Reeves’s Arkham Series Is Set In The New DCU

Reeves, director of 'The Batman' and its upcoming sequel, is also a producer on animated series 'Batman: Caped Crusader'

It turns out The Batman director Matt Reeves will have his hand in three Batman universes. DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn has confirmed on Threads that the Arkham Asylum-set series Reeves had been developing is not a The Batman extension. Instead, it’s now pertaining to the Batman of the main DC Universe.

The topic came up as he was asked by Iann Silva whether Reeves was producing another “Batverse” project in addition to it, the The Batman sequel and its The Penguin spinoff. Gunn replied “Right now Matt is producing Arkham as a DCU series, so there’s just the two for now.” While that’s not entirely true and will be elaborated (it also seems to omit The Penguin, which Deadline took as an ominous sign), it was a simple irrelevant error. He would reiterate upon another user’s surprised reaction “Yes. We love Matt as a director and producer so he’ll be producing stories both within his The Batman universe and within the DCU.”

Claiming to Nick Tizando that it was always intended to be part of the DCU despite having reached being an Arkham show instead of a Gotham City Police Department show by the time The Batman was released eight months before he became studio head, Gunn said “It was one of the first pitches we bought when Peter and I came onboard. I don’t know the permutations it went through before that time.” So maybe he meant that it’s been since his start and not the projects. The series now finds itself most directly connected to The Brave and the Bold, where Bruce is old enough to have his son Damian Wayne as his Robin instead of The Batman, where Bruce is so early in his vigilantism that the sequel is unlikely to jump far enough to a similar age as the former. The film is being directed by Andy Muschietti. Seeing as the series hasn’t been sequenced within the initial “Gods & Monsters” chapter of the new DC Universe and only Superman: Legacy has definitive date and casting, it’s probably going to be a while before those wheels get rolling.

But yeah, there is one more Batman project that Matt Reeves is a part of: he’s one of the executive producers on the upcoming animated series Batman: Caped Crusader, whose two-season order went to Amazon Prime Video after the Discovery regime that had taken over Warner Bros. dropped it and a handful of other projects in August 2022 with two of them, Urkel Saves Santa and Merry Little Batman finally seeing release in the last month because a full two missed Christmases would’ve been really awkward. While details about Caped Crusader have been sparse and visuals even sparser, it was touted with J.J. Abrams and Bruce Timm as Reeves’s fellow executive producers as a spiritual successor to Batman: The Animated Series and would take Batman to his roots. It makes three different Batman iterations Reeves has been involved with, and Reeves’s fourth simultaneous project.

Sources: Threads (1, 2, 3), Deadline