James Gunn Reveals The Reason The DCU’s Arkham Show Got Canned

For all the great ideas coming out of DC Studios these days, not everything can come to fruition. About half the projects James Gunn initially announced when he first took on the daunting task of rebooting the DC Universe are now MIA; while Creature Commandos, Superman, and Lanterns have all made it through production, the same can’t be said for The Authority, the Suicide Squad spin-off Waller, or Booster Gold. Then there are relics of the old DCEU that Gunn and his creative co-chair, Peter Safran, tried to fit into the new, to no avail.

DC’s defunct Arkham series is one such relic. The Batman director Matt Reeves was once developing a series focused on Arkham Asylum — which would have been canon to the DCU, not his “Batman Epic Crime Universe” — but production stalled. Variety reported that the show was indefinitely shelved in 2024, and no official word has come from DC Studios since. Over a year after that Variety update, however, Gunn is finally breaking the silence, revealing (in his own coy way) why the project fell to the wayside.

Gunn recently sat down for an interview with BobaTalks, where he finally addressed the fate of DC’s Arkham show. While there’s “hope” the studio will someday revisit the project, it may not be any time soon. “That isn’t something that is being developed by anyone right now,” Gunn said.

When asked why the Arkham series was shelved, Gunn admitted that “it just didn’t work.” Plenty of factors could’ve made the show an improper fit for the new DCU, and it went through several evolutions long before Gunn and Safran were appointed as the new heads of DC Studios. The project first got the green light in 2020 as a procedural about the Gotham police department set in Reeves’ Epic Crime Universe. It eventually evolved into a show about the inner workings of Arkham Asylum, then it jumped from the non-canon Elseworlds into the canon DCU.

With Gunn working on his own new vision for Batman and Gotham, it’s likely that Reeves’ take on the world just didn’t gel with his ideas. It also feels counterintuitive to introduce the DCU’s Gotham without its Dark Knight front and center, and an Arkham show likely would have focused on the villains that populate the asylum, not the vigilante who put them there. Creature Commandos established that Batman is already active in the DCU, so the next logical step would be to see him in his own solo adventure. After that, there’s every chance that Gunn and Reeves could revisit an Arkham spin-off — but for now, that corner for the universe will have to wait.