The Batman 2 Could Have a Grounded Mr Freeze Says Director

Matt Reeves says The Batman 2 could include a grounded version of Mr. Freeze. Batman is coming back to movie theaters in a dark and gritty iteration featuring Robert Pattinson as a Bruce Wayne inspired in part by Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain.

The moody and realistic theme suggested by a Cobain-infused Caped Crusader indeed carries over to every character in Reeves’ The Batman, including Paul Dano’s Zodiac-informed Riddler and Colin Farrell’s more-realistic take on The Penguin. Of course other Batman movies have gone the grounded route before, most memorably Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster The Dark Knight. But some Batman films have instead gone the exact opposite route, embracing everything fantastical and campy about the DC Comics crime fighter and his villainous opponents. Perhaps the most infamously campy of all Batman movie efforts was Batman & Robin, a film renowned (and maligned) for director Joel Schumacher’s over-the-top touches, like giving Batman’s suit nipples and introducing wild versions of characters like Poison Ivy and Mr. Freeze.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze indeed continues to reign in Batman movie lore as one of the series’ most bizarre and ultimately ridiculously cartoonish villains. At least on the surface, it would seem the Mr. Freeze character would not fit at all in the more realistic Batman world envisioned by Reeves in The Batman, but Reeves himself might disagree with this perception. Via Collider, the director recently opened the door on Mr. Freeze actually showing up in a sequel to his Batman movie:

“In my view, I just feel drawn to finding the grounded version of everything. So to me it would be a challenge in an interesting way to try and figure out how that could happen, even the idea of something like Mr. Freeze, that such a great story, right? I think there’s actually a grounded version of that story, which could be really powerful and could be really great.”

The Mr. Freeze presented by Schumacher and Schwarzenegger may have been a crazy-looking silver-painted quip-machine but the actual underlying character has a tragic backstory that could easily be reworked to be more grounded and realistic. In Batman lore, Dr. Victor Fries is a cryogenic scientist engaged in research that he hopes will cure his terminally ill wife. Unfortunately Fries falls victim to a lab accident that freezes his body and forces him to wear a cryo-suit in order to survive. Fries’ further motivation in Batman stories is still to help his wife, but he occasionally comes into conflict with Batman along the way. This backstory was of course preserved for Batman & Robin, but the look of the character as well as Schwarzenegger’s campy performance sucked all the humanity out and left Mr. Freeze as a one-dimensional villain.

Indeed Reeves is not the first person to mention Mr. Freeze showing up in his Batman universe, as Zack Snyder previously raised the possibility in an interview and put forth Matthias Schweighöfer as the man to play the character. Obviously Mr. Freeze possesses a meaty character backstory that a writer-director like Reeves could do a lot with. And it seems it should be possible to re-design the character’s look in a way that would fit with Reeves’ realistic take on Batman. Surely too there is an actor capable of bringing enough nuance to Mr. Freeze to make the audience feel his inner-conflict in a genuine way, raising the emotional stakes on his battle with Batman. It remains to be seen however if Reeves will actually go through with it and bring Mr. Freeze into his Batman universe if and when The Batman 2 gets the go-ahead.

Source: Collider

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