Since James Gunn became the new boss of DC studios, it feels like he sticks to one formula: everything looks like his Suicide Squad.
2008, the year of the housing crisis and the subsequent Great Recession, is as good a time of death as any for the fiction of the American Dream. Economic forces manipulated by kleptocrats have completely unbalanced our received wisdom that anyone, regardless of their station and prestige, was afforded the opportunity to rise to success. But you can’t really kill a dream in America; you can only commodify it. That same year, the American Dream was reborn, repurposed, and repackaged by corporate America. Not for people, but for a new promise that any property, afforded the opportunity, could rise to prominence.
Marvel Studios’ “Avengers Initiative” was a project built from necessity. Facing bankruptcy in the 90s, Stan Lee and pals found themselves selling off the film rights to their most successful characters—Spider-Man, X-Men, the Fantastic Four—just to stay afloat. All they were left with once they had the chance to make a go of it themselves were the B-Stringers: an alcoholic tech bro, an Allied Propaganda mascot, a technically public domain anyway Norse god, a Hulk. To everyone’s multi-billion dollar surprise, they made it work. They made it work so well that it kind of ruined movies. But, significantly, it defeated the conventional comic book movie wisdom that to make a huge runaway hit, you needed a Superman or a Batman. Maybe you could build your empire on some weird little freak nobody’s even heard of. But how weird, how freaky, can we really get here?
James Gunn became one of the most successful men in Hollywood today answering that question. Coming up with the proudly sophomoric and sloppy underdogs of Troma Entertainment (think Toxic Avenger), he made his studio bones on a couple pretty decent Scooby-Doo movies, and proved his superhero bona fides on the pitch black Rainn Wilson and Elliot Page comedy Super, which does a better job of being a Watchmen movie than Zack Snyder’s Watchmen. So it was only a matter of time before Marvel Cinematic Universe mastermind Kevin Feige, known so well today for his modus operandi of taking promising, unique independent filmmakers and chaining them like Prometheus to his studio system, tapped him to make something Marvel.
Feige had been talking in public about adapting the rather obscure ragtag Marvel space heroes, the “Guardians of the Galaxy,” since at least 2010 during that year’s San Diego Comic-Con. Though the team had existed in some form or another since 1969, the version of the team that Feige was interested in—the one we’d see at the movies—was brand new. The Guardians as we know them, Star-Lord, Gamora, Drax, Groot, and Rocket Raccoon, didn’t actually exist as a team anywhere until 2008, in a series relaunch by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning. No stranger to working as the underdog, it was just the project where James Gunn would thrive.
How DC got their hand on that ball was a matter of some cancel culture serendipity. During the space between the second and third Guardians of the Galaxy movies, some outrageously tasteless tweets James Gunn wrote ten years prior resurfaced. Disney, the owners of the Marvel Studios brand since 2009, cut ties with Gunn over it for about a week—just long enough for DC’s own parent company, Warner Bros., to swoop in with their own Guardians-caliber offer. But who were DC’s equivalent to Marvel’s scrappy Guardians of the Galaxy?
That was was a puzzle DC had already solved, poorly but accurately, with the Academy Award winning 2016 Suicide Squad (Best Makeup and Hairstyling). The influences Gunn had on what Warner Bros. wanted their Suicide Squad to be were apparent to anyone with eyes, ears, or a short term memory: the needle dropping soundtrack, the gleeful gore, the often puerile comedy. But without Gunn himself, the film had none of the heart, or sense of character. Unlike the Guardians, the Squad as we know them today—give or take a Harley—has existed with its current premise since 1986. And as fortune would have it, they’re even better suited to Feige’s original hail mary casting of the Guardians for unleashing the spigot on that IP-flowing fountain. Because that’s exactly what they were designed for 40 years ago.
Here’s something I often find myself writing when we’re talking about comics: let’s go back to Crisis on Infinite Earths. In 1985, DC Comics published their first major crossover event to clear the decks on 50 years of crufted up comic book continuity, all to present a less intimidating face to new readers. One benefit of this was, with nearly every character starting over on equal footing, it didn’t just have to be Batman and Superman rising to the fore. There were new opportunities for the thousands of characters starting fresh right alongside them. It was to this end that John Ostrander and Len Wein created a new vehicle to showcase the obscurities of DC’s roster, giving them new cause to get in front of readers’ eyes: a new, Post-Crisis incarnation of the Suicide Squad.
The original Suicide Squad, a team which appeared in issues of The Brave and the Bold in the late 50s and early 60s, wasn’t much more than a riff on Jack Kirby’s Challengers of the Unknown. But in the 1986 Legends miniseries, setting up much of the early status quo for the Post-Crisis DC Universe, Wein and Ostrander took the concept in an entirely new direction—one which, under the complex, authoritative figure of Amanda Waller, would feature a rotating team of cast-off villains, forgotten heroes, and former supporting characters. Not just the likes of lesser Batman and Flash villains like Deadshot and Captain Boomerang, but heroes like Vixen, whose own solo title was preemptively aborted in a 1978 industry crunch; Bronze Tiger, blaxploitation martial arts sidekick to Dennis O’Neil’s Richard Dragon, Kung-Fu Fighter; Enchantress, a former backup feature to Supergirl; and Nightshade, part of a collection of characters recently acquired from the defunct Charlton Comics which DC sought to integrate into their own Post-Crisis universe.
The resulting spin-off, 1987’s Suicide Squad, thus became one of the most versatile titles in DC’s catalog. Amanda Waller’s nuanced morality allowed for the team, depending on its roster, to take on missions from either side of the morality spectrum at any level of scale, from quelling small town white nationalists to grappling with the forces of Darkseid on Apokolips. Following in the tradition of the Golden Age Justice Society of America, whose All-Star Comics in the 1940s was functionally a home for heroes to stay in the spotlight without titles to call their own, Suicide Squad literally served as a rehabilitation clinic not just in fiction as sentence-reducing labor for its incarcerated members, but for the images of those characters themselves, elevating what might have once been a C or a D list character as high as a B. As Iron Man—nobody’s favorite superhero before 2008—would prove to the world, a B is really all you need.
So, James Gunn does The Suicide Squad, a loose sequel to the previous non-definite articled Suicide Squad that doesn’t require you to watch the first film at all. Not a lot of people watched this one either, but most were charitable in affording that to the continued horrors of a deadly pandemic, and HBO Max’s short-sighted year long “Same Day Streaming” policy which had filmmakers none too pleased. Critically, it was the fifth-best reviewed DC film of all time.
If anything made The Suicide Squad work, it was the massive number of weirdos at play. Some pulled from the deepest benches of DC history, like Javelin and The Weasel; some invented for the story, like The Detachable Kid and Ratcatcher 2. Like the first movie, much of it revolved around Harley Quinn—a character who was at first controversially associated with the Suicide Squad franchise in the 2011 “New 52” comic relaunch, and 14 years later is still more often than not the series star. Unlike the previous film, The Suicide Squad gave emotional arcs to its less prominent players. The likes of Polka-Dot Man, King Shark, and even the generally Squad-ubiquitous but dry-toast-bland Rick Flag all got their own beats that elevated them into new favorites.
One character, a comic relief turned third act villain, would be the focus of Gunn’s next DC project. John Cena’s Peacemaker was credibly both hilarious and threatening, but we never got to know the man under the helmet like we did the other central members of the team. The legend goes that Gunn spent one week during production of The Suicide Squad banging out a full 8 episode script for a Peacemaker TV show. It was greenlit right away.
The internet loved Peacemaker, with its modern dance intro and stream-of-consciousness dialogue. But despite the title, Gunn always insisted that Peacemaker was an ensemble piece. And it was! Just as important as Peacemaker’s own story arc reckoning with his Neo-Nazi father who pushed him into vigilantism is his brilliant supporting cast of Amanda Waller’s estranged daughter, Leota Adebayo; put-upon Belle Reve warden turned problem asset babysitter John Economos; disguised alien agent on the side of humanity, Clemson Murn; James Gunn’s wife, who is fine; and an autistically swagged up incarnation of Marv Wolfman’s Vigilante. James Gunn had created another Suicide Squad.
In 2022, as we were all still doing the Peacemaker cast’s “Do You Wanna Taste It” dance, Warner Bros. did something extremely rare: they made a good decision. With the future direction of the DC cinematic universe in shambles after power plays from Zack Snyder, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and a seemingly endless cascade of otherwise bad reviews, the corporate leadership turned to the one guy who, if you at least looked at it accepting the outside influence of a pandemic, hadn’t fucked it all up. Along with his established business partner Peter Safran, James Gunn was put in charge of what would now be called “DC Studios.” Where none had really existed before, Gunn and Safran would be DC’s own Kevins Feige.
James Gunn got to work announcing a full slate of new DC projects. The very first would be an animated series which just wrapped up on HBO Max: Creature Commandos, a series about a team of misfit monsters embarking on a suicide mission for Amanda Waller. It was yet another Suicide Squad. He announced a film adaptation of Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch’s The Authority, a team of morally ambiguous superhumans who do the things heroes won’t. Another Suicide Squad. Even Superman, the live action film DC has pinned all its hopes on as the ground claimed by superhero movies for a decade gives way to video game movies, is full of weird superheroes: Hawkgirl, Metamorpho, Mister Terrific, and Guy Gardner, the most obnoxious Green Lantern. Anyone familiar with the mythology of the Justice League can recognize what Gunn is doing: setting up his own simulacrum of Keith Giffen and JM DeMatteis’ most irreverent vision of the team, Justice League International, a collective of third-stringers cast in the shadow of the more famous heroes they couldn’t get. That’s right. It’s another Suicide Squad.
So why does this keep happening? Is it the only move Gunn has? I don’t think so. He’s proven himself a more versatile filmmaker than that. But imagine you’re wagering hundreds of millions of dollars on the success of a film. That’s going to make it difficult to break the mold, and make a risky decision. You’re going to stick with what works until it doesn’t. And so far, at least critically, what seems to work for Gunn is Suicide Squads. We’ll see if that bears out in real dollars, but it’s a better bet than a complete unknown.
From a creative standpoint, it’s not a bad thing either. The best thing about DC Comics, when it gets out of its own way, is that it’s not actually the Batman and Superman Company. It’s a publishing house filled with strange, imaginative, often contradictory characters and concepts, which really buzzes at its best when you get those A-Listers out of the way. There are 30,000 freaks and weirdos who live together in this universe created by hundreds of creative voices over 90 years of work, and the absurdity of their coexistence compounds that exponentially. This is comics. It’s Suicide Squad.
