Max kills that planned Batman series set in Arkham Asylum

It’s not new to note that the world of Warner Bros. Discovery’s various DC Comics-based movies and shows is a bit of a madhouse. With projects featuring the company’s big-name superheroes not just being split between those that date from before James Gunn and Peter Safran’s takeover of the brand a few years back, and the still-developing material set to come after—but also those projects that are siloed off in their own little universes, like the Joker movies, or the various attempted spin-offs of Matt Reeves’ The Batman—the whole thing has become incredibly unwieldy since entire edifice started to crumble in the wake of 2017’s Justice League. Is it any wonder that even a big-name Batman project might fall through the cracks?

This is per Variety, which reports that a planned Max series that started life as a spin-off of The Batman, before becoming focused on the workings of notorious supervillain storage facility Arkham Asylum, has now been canceled at the streamer. Developed initially by Terence Winter (who got “creative differences”-ed right back off the project), the show was initially supposed to be about the workings of the Gotham Police Department in Reeves’ Bat-verse, a la Colin Farrell’s upcoming Penguin show. But it mutated over a few years, and with the arrival of new showrunner Anthonio Campos (The Staircase), into an Arkham show that Gunn said in 2023 was actually going to be part of their upcoming DC Universe reboot, because why not say that, it was free and basically meant nothing.

Especially if the show got shit-canned, which this one has: Variety says today that Max has decided not to push forward on the series. There’s no word on why the Arkham series won’t move forward—the basic premise is intriguing enough, with potential for lots of supervillain drama—but at the same time, it’s not a total shock to see a show that had such a convoluted journey toward the screen (set on a streamer that kills shows with Arkham-worthy sociopathy) be sent to an early grave.