20 Greatest Arrowverse Villains
7. Gorilla Grodd
Faced with dodgy CG realisation and poor storylines, Gorilla Grodd had the potential to be an utter disaster on the small screen - one of the comic book Flash’s greatest and most menacing foes reduced to unintentional comedy.
It’s to the show’s credit that this wasn’t the way Grodd’s CW debut panned out. Instead, they accentuated the positives and hid the negatives: using darkness and the confined surroundings of subway and sewer tunnels to mask the cheapness of the effects required to create off the giant gorilla, while using canny storytelling to play up the villain’s intelligence and formidable psychic gifts alongside his sheer size and animal fury.
The result surprised everyone. Grodd was terrifying, unlike any villain seen in the Arrowverse so far, and an unusually faithful adaptation of the original comic book character.
Subsequent uses of the character didn’t quite live up to his original introduction, a particularly cringeworthy fight with Gorilla City’s king Solovar representing exactly the kind of poor showing fans had originally expected.
Still, for a while Gorilla Grodd exceeded all expectations and brought something genuinely new to the Arrowverse.