While the DCEU builds a grand universe with members of the Justice League and beyond, Geoff John’s revealed in an interview with IGN that he wants to take the same building blocks of an interconnected universe and scale it down to fit Batman and the Bat Family.
“We haven’t gone out there and said what our slate is and that’s because we’ll do it when we’re ready and we have the films that we’re excited about. But for Batman, what I will say is that Batman is more than just Batman and, you know, it’s been way too long since we’ve seen an expansion of that universe, and Batgirl – we are doing Batgirl with Joss Whedon, it’s going to be super exciting. He’s going to start that next year, and that’s just the start. We want to explore The Batman Universe in a very big new way and Matt Reeves is coming on to do Batman now, and we don’t want to do the same thing that has been done before. We want to build it out just like we built it out in the comics.”
With a Batgirl and Nightwing movie already in development it stands to reason that Johns is already off to a good start in expanding the Bat mythos. There is certainly no shortage of characters to pick from, as demonstrated by Detective Comics in Rebirth, an entire team of Bat-Family characters can make for compelling storytelling.
A word of caution, however. With the current rumblings of an Affleck-sized shakeup of the character and Sony’s multiple failed attempts to build a universe strictly around Spider-Man, these sort of franchise-building efforts are not a guaranteed success. Hopefully Geoff Johns and Warner Bros. is learning from their successes and failures enough to let a Batman Family universe come about naturally, with films that stand on their own first and foremost.
