The Penguin Was More Tasking Than The Batman In One Major Way

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home December 26, 2024 2 Views 8 Min Read
The Penguin Was More Tasking Than The Batman In One Major Way

Summary

  • The Penguin is an accomplished show that matches up to “The Batman,” while managing to make its titular character disliked.
  • The makeup design for The Penguin was challenging due to different conditions and Colin Farrell’s hair.
  • Despite challenges, The Penguin received critical acclaim and award nominations and may have a second season on the way.

The Penguin has proven its worth a hundred times over as a spinoff and as a standalone experience, but a prominent crewmember reveals that the successful show presented a few notable difficulties that not even its theatrical parent project had to contend with.

The Penguin might be the golden boy of recent spin-off projects, as the show not only lived up to the quality and tone of Matt Reeves’ 2022 project The Batman but even went a step further to prove itself. Managing to overcome the heavy task of making its titular protagonist unlikeable, The Penguin effectively cemented its place as the most accomplished show in the genre in a long while. Starting strong and making even stronger strides over its eight-episode run, which saw episodes hit linear TV on HBO and pop up for streaming on Max, the show came to a wicked, grimly satisfying end that defined Oz Cobb as a true villain and set up more stellar storytelling in Reeves’ Elseworld universe.

Kraven and the Penguin

Related


Sony’s Spider-Man Universe Should’ve Followed The Penguin’s Formula

Sony’s Spider-Man Universe might have succeeded if it followed the same strategy as DC’s The Penguin.

With the season complete, The Penguin has been racking up a ton of award nominations, critical acclaim, and fan appreciation, but all that didn’t come without some serious trials and tribulations in one important department. Speaking to TheWrap in a recent interview, The Penguin makeup designer Mike Marino, who was responsible for turning leading man Colin Farrell from handsome Irishman to despicable Gotham gangster, revealed that bringing the character to life was significantly harder to do on the show than in 2022’s The Batman. “It was harder on every level,” Marino said. “We always try to build things to look great in person. My mentality is if you get it to look good in person, it’ll look good on film. But now we’re in different lighting environments (with) less control. We have extreme close-ups of makeup. It’s much more difficult.” While the performance was stellar, Farrell’s Oz Cobb wasn’t the main focus of The Batman, leading to more forgiving conditions for the makeup team.

In addition to pointing out the differences brought on by the requirements of filming a show centered on the villain, Marino also revealed one particular pain point that increased the difficulty of The Penguin. “Colin has a huge head of hair that doesn’t want to stay down,” Marino explained. “That’s why he’s always wearing a headband in interviews and stuff—hair’s wanting to stick up. So flattening that every day and making it look like he’s bald is the biggest challenge. And then the lighting and the coloration and all of those things play. There’s a million puzzle pieces and factors that will make or break this.” While Farrell, who had quite a hard time on The Penguin set himself during production, had consented to shave his head for his appearance in The Batman, the actor decided against taking on that sacrifice a second time for the show, introducing this previously absent problem into the equation.

CGI has come to dominate the comic book movie genre due to many of the characters and concepts explored in those projects being difficult to achieve with practical effects, but The Penguin has the good fortune of being an exception to this trend. With the show’s main character needing prosthetics and extensive cosmetic tinkering to exist, the makeup department is even more important than usual, and they delivered.

Marino and many others on the team are intimately familiar with the character in his many comic iterations, and this showed in the work they did. This is why among many other establishment honors for the show, The Penguin attracted nominations for makeup, special makeup effects, and hair styling (clearly not for Oz), all of which are clearly well-deserved. While The Penguin doesn’t need a season two, Reeves has revealed that talks are ongoing for another installment of the project with showrunner Lauren LeFranc. If a second season is agreed on, the makeup department will certainly have their fingers crossed that Farrell commits to the role up top to make the work easier this time around. Fans certainly wouldn’t mind another season of the same sort of compelling character work, and a second season could set up the third film in the planned trilogy of The Batman in the same way season one did for the second film.

All told, it’s becoming more and more obvious that Reeves’ The Batman films really could be more than a trilogy if Hollywood lets it, in the same vein as Tom Holland’s run as Spider-Man. While there’s little doubt that Oz Cobb will get what’s coming to him sooner rather than later, characters like him are the exact reason why a franchise like The Batman has so much potential. For now, fans can only wait and see what the filmmaker and creative team make of the golden opportunity that the hard work on The Penguin has granted.

The Penguin is available to stream on Max.

a (5)-3

More


Batman’s Arkhamverse Future Should Be Forever Marred by Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League tugs at Batman left and right and one fateful choice made should haunt Bruce Wayne and the Bat Family forever.

Source: TheWrap

Source link