Over the weekend, you might have spotted some chatter on social media about a Mr. Freeze movie being in the works. Based on information published in Production Weekly (which doesn't ever really mean much), it would be set in the same world as The Batman and The Penguin.
There are already rumblings about Mr. Freeze being The Batman - Part II's villain due to the sequel's winter setting, so a spin-off revolving around Dr. Victor Fries isn't too outlandish.
DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn was asked about the rumour on Threads and initially only added fuel to the fire with what proved to be a surprisingly vague response from the Superman director.
"I haven’t heard that one but there are a lot of rumors out there this week," he started. "Some of them are true, some are partially true, and some aren't true at all. If it’s fun for you to follow the unknowns, follow them, but don’t trust anything completely until you hear it from me or Peter (who is not online despite me seeing him tagged in stuff.)"
Perhaps realising that some had taken his response as a tease for this supposed Mr. Freeze project, Gunn later clarified, "It’s not a bad idea, so I wouldn’t say never but no there’s no truth to it at all."
The other rumours Gunn is referring to are likely what we've heard about who is in the running to play Lanterns' John Stewart. We'd imagine an official announcement about that casting will be made imminently.
There was a time when it seemed Warner Bros. wanted a slate of movies and TV shows set in the world of The Batman. At least two of those have failed to materialise - one was set in the GCPD and the other in Arkham Asylum - and we're not overly optimistic about that long-rumoured Clayface movie either.
"In my view, I just feel drawn to finding the grounded version of everything," the Bat-verse's Matt Reeves said in 2022. "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 is 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. So, I love the fantastical side of Batman, but this iteration, obviously, while being, to me, I think it is very comics faithful, but I don’t think that this one is necessarily, it doesn’t lean as hard into the fantastical, I guess."
He added, "But I think to me what would be interesting would be to try and unwind the fantastical and see, well, how could that make sense here? And so that’s kind of my view, how I see it."
You can check out Gunn's comments in full below.