This is from denofgeek.com
A couple of days. That's how long director James Gunn had to wait before Warner Bros. and DC came calling in 2018. Up until that moment, it'd been a pretty turbulent July. The iconoclastic filmmaker who
made audiences cry over a talking tree in Guardians of the Galaxy was just fired by Disney-temporarily as it turns out—and his name was being besmirched on social media. Yet less than 72 hours after that
dismissal, WB was making him an offer that could change the face of DC superhero movies forever.
"It happened immediately," Gunn says with a hint of lingering chagrin. "We started talking about what the project would be. The first thing that was brought up was Superman, but I didn't know if I wanted
to do that."
So the studio suggested a once-in-a-lifetime alternative: make whatever you want. Gunn was free to adapt "anybody out of the DC catalogue." Somehow though, with an entire gleaming multiverse at his
disposal, Gunn only had eyes for the filthiest D-listers this side of Krypton. He only wanted to make The Suicide Squad.
The team of supervillain rejects has of course been adapted before, with David Ayer's divisive Suicide Squad coming out in 2016. The earlier movie was a hit too, grossing more than $700 million and
triggering a small bout of jealousy in Gunn, who even then thought
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that was the only DC property he ever wanted to do. But the film left something to be desired for many fans and critics.
To be clear, there are things Gunn absolutely loves about Ayer's movie. How could he not, when he incorporated so many of the 2016 film's cast into his own? In Gunn's mind, Margot Robbie was born to play
Harley Quinn, which he hopes to only further highlight by bringing out her "true lunacy" in the new movie. Viola Davis's Amanda Waller, meanwhile, was the first character he decided to put in his own film.
But Gunn is unambiguous on one point: his The Suicide Squad is going to be its own 31 flavors of weird.
"It wasn't something to contrast the first movie," Gunn says. "It wasn't about going through a checklist of this is good, this is bad, this works, this doesn't... but the concept that John Ostrander
started with in the comics, that these are B-grade, shitty superheroes who are considered disposable by the U.S. government and are sent out on these black-ops missions, where they probably won't make it
but who gives a shit because they're pieces-of-shit prisoners without many skills?"
That is the movie Gunn wanted to make. And he did so with R-rated glee.
Engineered as a standalone epic that might (or might not) be a sequel to the 2016 movie, Gunn's The Suicide Squad is, in essence, meant to be a spiritual
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