James Gunn's The Suicide Squad unveils a massive cast of potential future dead characters
If there was just one thing people didn’t love about David Ayers’ Suicide Squad movie—there wasn’t, but bear with us here for a second—it’s that it never really lived up to the title. In the comic books—especially John Ostrander’s famed run from the late ’80s and early ’90s—the Squad’s body count for personnel was suitably, well, suicidal; it was rare for a storyline to go by without at least one, and most likely more, of its named characters getting offed. (Hell, Ostrander famously killed off fellow comics writer Grant Morrison—who’d inserted himself into the DC Universe at the end of his famed Animal Man run—in one particularly bloody arc.) Ayers’ movie managed to give the axe to two measly Squad members (R.I.P. Slipknot), which seems kind of, well…bloodless, for a movie that’s all about disposable bad guys getting disposed.
Which is why we were so excited to see this Twitter post from the sequel’s director, James Gunn, earlier today. Gunn—whose Troma/Slither background gives him a pretty healthy back catalog of messy ways to kill minor characters—appears to be revealing the roster for his entire squad, and it’s absolutely massive. Now, most of these are names we already knew—even the oddball ones like Pete Davidson, Peter Capaldi, and Taika Waititi—but seeing them all up there in one place makes it pretty clear: Bad days are coming for some very bad people, because we can’t imagine anyone trying to fit too many of these folks on the same screen for long. Sorry, Capaldi.
The Suicide Squad is scheduled to arrive in theaters in August of 2021.