Gotham’s most dedicated gardener may at last have a plot of her own. Lauren LeFranc, who created and ran HBO’s The Penguin, is in talks to produce a Poison Ivy series for HBO and DC Studios. Deadline broke the story, with Variety and The Hollywood Reporter quickly confirming it.
Before anyone starts casting their fantasy Pamela Isley, the small print deserves reading. There is no greenlight yet. LeFranc would be producing rather than writing, and no writer has been attached, nor has anybody been cast in the lead. The series will also sit outside Matt Reeves’ Batman universe, so nobody should expect Robert Pattinson to wander through a greenhouse in the rain. Whether it belongs to James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DCU instead is a question no one has answered yet.
This particular seedling has had a bumpy season. Only a couple of months ago, reports suggested that DC Studios and HBO had turned down pitches for Poison Ivy and Catwoman series as part of a wider retreat from superhero television. Deadline says it had been tracking the project for months, but plans were paused while Paramount and Warner Bros merged. That deal closed on 6 October, putting David Ellison’s Skydance in charge of Warner Bros, DC and HBO, and a fortnight later Ivy is putting out shoots again. Corporate mergers, like compost heaps, apparently generate their own heat.
LeFranc has earned the benefit of the doubt. The Penguin turned Colin Farrell’s prosthetic gangster into the first live-action spin-off from a Batman film, became a ratings hit, picked up nine Emmys and won Cristin Milioti the lead actress award. Before that she wrote and produced on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. She is now under a two-year overall deal at HBO with her own banner, Acid and Tender Productions, and is also producing the mystery series Imposter for the network.
Ivy herself has been waiting a long time for top billing. Robert Kanigher and Sheldon Moldoff introduced her in Batman #181 back in 1966, and in the six decades since she has headlined neither a live-action film nor a series. Her most famous screen outing remains Uma Thurman’s turn in 1997’s Batman & Robin, a performance that began with an entrance from inside a gorilla suit and somehow got sillier from there. That script, by happy coincidence, came from Akiva Goldsman, who has just landed the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea reboot at Paramount+, which now lives under the same corporate roof as HBO. It’s a small Gotham after all. Peyton List played her in Fox’s Gotham, Bridget Regan in Batwoman, while Lake Bell’s voice work in the animated Harley Quinn, where Ivy is Harley’s girlfriend and the only grown-up in the room, has arguably done more for the character than any live-action version.
With Clayface oozing into cinemas this week and a Gorilla Grodd mockumentary heading for HBO Max next year, DC is quietly assembling a franchise built from people Batman has punched. Ivy is a fine candidate, provided the show remembers she’s at her best with an argument rather than just a pheromone. An eco-warrior who thinks humanity is the weed in the flowerbed has rarely looked more topical.
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