Gotham producers detailed their plans for their scrapped Metropolis series and why the plug was pulled on the series. Hot off their run on the Batman villain-focused DC series, showrunners John Stephens and Danny Cannon began developing a Metropolis show similar to their previous work. It would have explored the city most commonly linked to Superman before he arrived on the scene, instead focusing on Lois Lane and Lex Luthor. DC officially announced the project in January 2018, but they pulled the plug on it by 2019.
In IGN‘s oral history regarding the ten-year anniversary of Gotham‘s premiere, Stephens revealed exactly how they envisioned Metropolis, and that he still don’t know exactly why Warner Bros. ended up shelving the series before it even began.
“In the course of the pilot, it really featured Lois and Lex as the main characters. Geoff Johns had some really cool ideas about how the show should proceed in terms of a
Breaking Bad
of Lex, which was an awesome idea. I was really excited about doing in the same way… It’s pulpy, it’s comic, but it has a very realistic boots on the ground adult-ish feel. I was really excited to do that version of Metropolis. And I thought it would be cool if we actually got to do it at the end of the day. I never really know, to be honest, even after all these years, why Warner Brothers pulled the plug.”
The Gotham showrunners offered up possible explanations as to why the series never got off the ground, from WB getting cold feet around a Superman series without the Kryptonian, to the series’ hefty price tag. Read what the duo said below:
Danny Cannon: “Metropolis didn’t go because we kept saying Gotham without Batman works. It’s everything around Batman. It creates the world where he will live, right? Metropolis, no Superman. What is Metropolis? Metropolis is the character. Lois Lane was the character, deciding to be a journalist. And there’s this crazy fucking guy there who might be a genius called Lex. Fucking great things, right? It’s good, but the minute we said ‘no Superman,’ it was like “Nah.'”
John Stephens:
“
Superman was at the very end. It was going to launch [the DC Universe streaming service], and they were going to order it direct to series. At some point they had to sit down and write a $120 million check to do 10 episodes of this show, and I think they got cold feet. It wasn’t just a pilot, and someone else was picking up the pilot. Because they weren’t selling it off to Fox and having Fox pay for it. At that point they were going to be on the hook for the entire price tag. Now, obviously, they have their own platform, they’re used to it. But that platform did not exist.”
The Fate of Metropolis & Other Canceled DC Shows
Metropolis was officially announced on January 30, 2018. The main idea for the series was to show the rise of both Lois Lane as the star reporter for the Daily Planet and Lex Luthor as the infamous criminal mastermind (and Superman’s greatest adversary). Metropolis was not going to air on Fox like Gotham, but instead was going to be one of the big new series for the DC Universe streaming app. They were already working on Titans, which soon was followed by announcements for Doom Patrol and Swamp Thing. The Lane-Luthor show was set to air on the DC Universe app in 2019, but in April, the same month Gotham aired its final episode, it was reported that Metropolis had been scrapped.
While some might say the series sounds far too similar to Smallville, which already showed a young Lois Lane and Lex Luthor, HBO’s recent series The Penguin is exploring a similar idea of seeing Batman’s iconic villains rise to power as Gotham once did. But it’s doing it in a completely different way, which shows how malleable these characters and their stories can be. There is plenty to mine for both Lois Lane and Lex Luthor that could make for rich, dramatic shows that previous live-action adaptations have barely begun to tap into. Comics like Lex Luthor: Man of Steel by Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo and Lois Lane: Enemy of the People by Greg Rucka and Mike Perkins have delved deep into these characters and shown how they can carry their own stories.
“Making a television show, when you’re in the development stages, so frequently it’s like you’re trying to land a plane. You can see the runway, the plane’s coming in, and all of a sudden, we’re gonna crash. That’s what Metropolis felt like. But it was too bad because it was a really cool idea for a show,” said John Stephens regarding Metropolis being scrapped. Metropolis now lives as one of the many “what might have been” DC shows like the Justin Harley Aquaman pilot or the Justice League spin-off from Smallville.