The Penguin Season 2 got a new window amid the Warner Bros. shake-up that stripped Robert Pattinson’s The Batman Part II of its 2027 release date. The Colin Farrell crime drama ended its eight-episode run on HBO Max in November 2024 as one of the best-reviewed titles in the DC Studios catalog, and calls for its return never really quieted down. HBO never officially ordered a second season, though, and its prospects swung between hopeful and hopeless for the better part of two years.
The show’s entry on the Writers Guild of America website now displays a 2026 to 2027 window for Season 2, replacing the 2025 to 2026 range it had when the listing first surfaced in May. Lauren LeFranc, who created the series as a spinoff of Matt Reeves’ The Batman, remains attached as showrunner and executive producer, while Mad Men writer Semi Chellas stays on as consulting producer. HBO and DC Studios have made no announcement to accompany the change, which fans spotted in July.
Guild listings are harder to dismiss than entries on open databases such as IMDb because only a writer or an authorized member of a production can edit them. This made the original May listing the most credible indicator in months that The Batman spinoff still had a future. The optimism took a hit in June, when industry insider Jeff Sneider reported that DC Studios and HBO would not move forward with more episodes.
The mixed signals reached the very top of HBO long before that report. The series won nine Emmys from 24 nominations, and Farrell collected a Golden Globe for playing Gotham crime boss Oz Cobb, so executives never stopped fielding questions about a follow-up. Content chief Casey Bloys said in November 2025 that HBO was “talking to the [DC] team about what a second season of ‘The Penguin’ could look like.” By March, his tone cooled considerably, and he admitted a renewal remained “certainly complicated” due to Farrell’s crowded film calendar.
The movie side of Matt Reeves’ Gotham changed days after the window update. Warner Bros. pulled The Batman Part II off its October 1, 2027 slot in mid-July and gave the date to The Great Beyond, the J.J. Abrams sci-fi film starring Glen Powell and Jenna Ortega. The Batman Part II’s release date is now set for February 18, 2028. Reeves started filming the sequel in London on June 12 with Farrell reprising Oz alongside Pattinson’s Dark Knight.
Will The Penguin Season 2 Actually Happen?
Season 2 of The Penguin officially getting greenlit is hard to predict, but the odds look better than before. The guild entry got updated twice in three months, and truly dead projects do not generate that kind of activity. Somebody keeps doing the administrative work behind the scenes, which only happens when a show remains a live conversation.
However, there are some obstacles standing in the way of the series’ renewal, though. Farrell is the whole show, and nothing is happening until he commits, something he never quite did in interview after interview. HBO also entered the series at the Emmys as a limited series, the category for shows that finish in a single run, which reveals how the network classified it internally.
The way Season 1 ended complicates things even further. Oz finished his climb to the top of Gotham’s underworld, his rival Sofia Falcone returned to Arkham, and the story reached a natural stopping point. LeFranc said from the beginning that she would only come back with an idea strong enough to top the original. So, it’s likely Season 2 doesn’t happen until the creatives can find a compelling story to tell.
