Well, well, well.
James Gunn was recently removed from the director’s chair of Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy 3 after offensive tweets from several years back surfaced. Despite an outcry from fans (as well as members of the cast), Disney’s decision was final, and Gunn was fired out of the airlock into the cold vacuum of space. It’s still using his script, though, naturally. Gunn moving from Marvel to DC isn’t exactly a surprise, but it sure happened quickly, and the project in question is perhaps the most perfect fit for his sensibilities: Suicide Squad 2.
The Wrap reports that Gunn is currently in talks to both write and direct Suicide Squad 2, with the hope that he can infuse his brand of anarchic magic into DC’s team of C-list supervillains. The first Suicide Squad movie notably tried to ape the success of Guardians Of The Galaxy in its marketing and with its soundtrack, taking a random selection of classic rock tunes and throwing them over scenes seemingly at random. Let’s just say, it…did not work as well as Gunn’s curated approach to music in the Guardians movies, and leave it at that. Perhaps hiring the architect of those films’ success seems like the best way to do it?
The first Suicide Squad movie didn’t manage to capture any of the weirdness or whimsy that seemed so effortless in Guardians Of The Galaxy, either. By comparison, Suicide Squad appeared to have been edited with a hatchet, with wildly different tones from scene-to-scene, a Harley Quinn and Joker arc that seemed like it had been abandoned midway through the film, and a dull, sky-portal climax that seemed out of place with the team’s ’80s action movie (and hyper-violent) roots.
Gavin O’Connor (The Accountant) had previously been announced to direct and he was expected to co-write the script with Todd Stashwick. But with Gunn coming on, it would appear that the studio is looking for a radically different direction for the team. Should Gunn sign on the dotted line, it would be right in line with both the overall mission statement and recent direction changes of the DCEU. Warner Bros. has stuck to the idea that these should be director-driven films (check), but recently have embraced a sense of humour, as the trailers for both Aquaman and Shazam prove. The studio is likely going to experiment with an R-rating for the upcoming Joker solo movie, so perhaps it’ll give Gunn a chance to take the Suicide Squad to some even more mature places with this sequel. Maybe we’ll finally get DC’s answer to Deadpool with this one.
It’s not clear which members of the cast will return, but you have to expect Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn (who will next be seen in 2020’s Birds Of Prey movie) is a lock, as well as Will Smith’s Deadshot.
There’s still no release date set for Suicide Squad 2, but Warner Bros. currently has 5th June, 2020 reserved for an unnamed DC movie. Things would have to get moving pretty quickly for that to happen, though, and with Ms. Robbie busy readying Birds Of Prey for earlier that year, this seems like a stretch.
As for the director of the first Suicide Squad film, David Ayer, he’s thrown his support behind the decision to hire Gunn already…
More as we get it.