GOTHAM Director Looking To Introduce Mr. Freeze
It's going to be amazing watching the rise of the heroes and villains of Gotham City in the new Batman inspired series coming to Fox. Gotham revolves around the character Jim Gordon, but it's the villains that surround him who are going to make this show really interesting.
It has already been confirmed that Catwoman, the Penguin, the Riddler, Poison Ivy, and the Joker will be included in the story. There's also new characters created for the series such as Jada Pinkett Smith‘s Fish Mooney.
In a recent interview with director Danny Cannon, he revealed that there's another villain he'd like to introduce. That villain is Mr. Freeze, who has one of the saddest backstories of any villains in the Batman Rogues Gallery. He lost his wife to a terminal illness, and as much as he tried, he couldn't save her.
Up to this point the best iteration of this character comes from Batman: The Animated Series. They nailed the character perfectly and fully realized the kind of person he really was. That show did more for Mr. Freeze than any of the comics he appeared in up until that point.
This is what the director of the pilot episode had to say about bringing Freeze on in an interview with HitFix:
"I have a big pitch with [showrunner] Bruno [Heller] about the Mr. Freeze character, whose origins are uncertain. If I can win Geoff Johns over and if I can win Bruno over, then I look forward to the moment where that character can be realized."
There's still a lot of room to play with Freeze's backstory, and Cannon obviously has some ideas of what he would like to do with the character. Like all of the other villains the show introduces, I'm sure the team of talent will reinterpret the characters past to fit the world they've created.
If the series goes for as long as they hope it does, I'm sure one day we'll see Freeze make his debut. Cannon went on to say that they're in no rush at the moment though:
“The beauty of this, both myself and Bruno did not sign on until we heard both network and studio assure us that we would not be forced into realizing this so quickly. We want a slow-burn.”
Sounds good to me! I'm all about the slow burn.