For all those die-hard Batman fans who wait years for a new movie to release, there is good news — Batman’s crime-ridden gritty fictional metropolis of Gotham City will be the focus of a new drama on Fox. Based on the latest comic book-inspired series, the idea is to tap superheroes’ ability to draw audiences to both film and TV.
Fox described its new show titled Gotham as “the origin stories of Commissioner James Gordon and the villains that made Gotham famous,” said the network on Wednesday. Gordon, played by British actor Gary Oldman in the last Christian Bale-starrer series, is the police commissioner of Gotham City, and often supports Batman to defeat the city’s villains.
Each episode will be an hour long, and the pilot will be written and produced by Bruno Heller, a British screenwriter best known for co-creating the HBO-BBC produced drama Rome, which explored Ancient Rome’s reign under Julius Caesar and Emperor Augustus.
Fox, which received the rights of the show after a bidding war, has yet to announce when the series will air and who will star in it. It is not clear whether Batman would even be a character in the series.
The news regarding Gotham comes on the same night as the launch of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D on Walt Disney Co’s television network ABC, which premiered on Tuesday with 11.9 million viewers. The series features human agents and is based on the world of Marvel’s Avengers comics, featuring an ensemble of superheroes including Iron Man, Thor and Captain America.
Gotham will be produced by Time Warner Inc’s Warner Bros Entertainment, which incorporated DC Entertainment, the company behind the DC Comics universe that includes Batman and Superman. The series will air on Fox, a unit of 21st Century Fox Inc.
The latest Batman adaptation, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy starring Christian Bale as the caped crusader, made more than $2billion at box offices worldwide.
Oscar-winning actor Ben Affleck will be the next person to don the Batman mask on the big screen as he faces off with Henry Cavill’s Superman in Man of Steel 2, due to release in theatres in 2015.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 27th, 2013.
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