The Suicide Squadcame out more than a year ago, however, the current landscape for superhero movies and shows suggests James Gunn’s first DC work might live on to become a seminal piece of cinema that, in the future, could teach the studio, and Marvel as well, a lesson or two about how to handle their intellectual properties.
Gunn’s Hollywood career has always been irreverent, yet it took him very little to establish the kind of tone he wanted for DC’s second go atThe Suicide Squad, and that included killing off enough obscure characters to make more than a fewMarvelseries. See, while thefirst few minutes ofThe Suicide Squadmay appear to be nothing more than a gory showcase of special effects, they also remind us there are comic book properties better left in print.
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To Kill A D-List Superhero
Although new Warner Bros. management has started to correct the previous administration’s course, over the past few years the company had endlessly (and unsuccessfully) tied to replicate the Marvel formula. That is, make a growing number of superhero movies whose well-thought interconnection makes even less popular names likeAnt-Man, for example, incredibly marketable and profitable films.
On the face of it, it’s pretty self-evident why any executive would want to follow that path, nevertheless, afterAvengers: Endgameeven Kevin Feige’s MCU master plan has hit a few roadblocks, which makes it all the least surprising that his DC rivals would experience the same. Is it still possible to pull that off? Sure, Gunn’sPeacemakerbrought a ton of D-listers into the spotlight, but at the heart of it, what makes John Cena’s Peacemaker so good is portraying him as little more than a joke.
Even in Marvel, it’s a well-known fact that Feige didn’t have Stan Lee and company’sfinest creations available when the MCU started, still, the formula worked largely because most movies were very entertaining and passed the mark.Guardians of the Galaxyis another example, as the Guardians were not too popular, whereas thanks to Gunn’s first Marvel masterpiece there’s a successfulGuardiansgame with high production values.
Gunn’s decision to laughably kill off the likes of Blackguard, Mongal, Javelin, Savant, and Captain Boomerang is the director’s way of telling viewers “listen, not even I can make a film work with these guys. Instead, let’s have some fun watching them die." It may sound cynical, but moving forward the genre is packed with heroes and villains that could fall under that umbrella.
James Gunn’s Lesson For Marvel And DC
If there’s one thingThe Suicide Squadteaches studios is that some characters are just not that important, at least not without a compelling story and script to back them up, hence why it’s hard to get the audience excited about certain properties. Perhaps the first example coming out of Marvel’s Phase Four isEternals, whose numbers are simply too big to flesh out a convincing plot arc for everyone involved in the film, which in turn results in misplaced efforts and a film where it’s hard to come out of loving any one of its characters.
While Marvel’s Phase Five and Six have a lot going for them, such as theFantastic Four,Avengers: The Kang DynastyandSecret Wars, it’s disingenuous to say Agatha Harkness can hope to elicit the same emotions among fans. Having a spinoff come out nearly 3 years afterWandaVisionfor a short-lived character that’s already dead, is a worse omen than releasing aBlack Widowmovie that was sadly too little too late.
Echo,Ironheart, andArmor Warsare all projects whose fate could follow a similar path because all those names require an extra effort to work when there is so much else viewers can turn their attention to. Ironically,theThunderboltslineupcontains at least two names that very few fans would be mad to see go down à laSuicide Squad(Ghost and Taskmaster) because neither of those is a ticket seller in their MCU form.
The jury is still out on what will happen to those, but DC has learned that lesson, perhaps too well,after cancelingBatgirl,Supergirl,Wonder Twins, plus so many more that were axed along the way.Over at Sony,Spider-Manis clearly carryingany interest in the rest of the studio’s projects, so it’sno wonderMorbiuscouldn’t catch a breakwith what little it brought to the table.
To be clear, it’s not as if any of the aforementioned productions orsomething likeBlue Beetlecan’t be successfulor good, whatThe Suicide Squad’sopening scene teaches executives, screenwriters, and directors is that just because one can do something, doesn’t mean that one should.
