Warner Bros. offered The Suicide Squad director James Gunn a DC movie just days after Marvel fired him. David Ayer directed 2016’s Suicide Squad but things didn’t quite turn out with the DCEU supervillain team-up film. So when it came time to re-assemble the squad, WB turned to Guardians of the Galaxy’s Gunn to make it happen.
Of course Gunn’s arrival on the WB/DC team was not a normal hire but was part of a whole drama that also saw him briefly being ousted from the Disney/Marvel family. It all started when old tweets of Gunn’s surfaced that led to a campaign calling for him to be fired from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Disney felt enough pressure to actually follow through and fire Gunn, who was immediately snapped up by Warner Bros. and later found himself assigned to the Suicide Squad sequel.
At the time it felt like WB moved incredibly quickly to snag Gunn in the wake of his firing, not even waiting for the controversy to die down. Just how quickly the studio actually moved has now been confirmed by producer Peter Safran. Speaking exclusively to Screen Rant, Safran said it only took a matter of days for WB chairman Toby Emmerich to reach out about obtaining Gunn's services:
So he got fired on a Friday in July, and on Tuesday Toby [Emmerich] came to me and said, "Tell James Gunn that whatever he wants to do at Warner Bros., we want him for it. Just tell us what he wants to do." So it was two [working] days later. So internal discussions were incredibly easy. It just felt like James did not merit the treatment that he got, and ultimately, Disney felt the same way and reversed their decision. But it was immediate... It was a really tough time, so it wasn't like he just wanted to jump back into something. So it took a little while to figure out what he wanted to do.
As Safran notes Gunn was later re-hired by Disney and put back on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. So now thanks to the controversy that led to his brief Disney ouster, Gunn finds himself leading not one but two popular comic book-derived franchises filled with eccentric characters and over-the-top action. But only one of those two franchises allows him to go fully R-rated. As Safran also said, he thinks the freedom that comes with an R-rating plays to Gunn’s strengths:
His instincts were, actually, probably more R rated than PG-13 anyway... For him to be able to turn that into something so great where he's working on a project that he loves, and then be able to go back and finish the trilogy on Guardians, it became the best of all worlds for him.
Indeed the biggest winner coming out of Gunn’s firing from Disney was Gunn himself. The second-biggest winner might be DC, depending on how The Suicide Squad performs at the box office. All eyes will obviously be on the film when it arrives as it’s set to be released on HBO Max at the same time it comes out in theaters. Box office has been recovering in the wake of COVID, but it remains to be seen if that upward trend will continue as more potential blockbusters get day-and-date streaming releases alongside their regular theatrical roll outs.
Fans of Suicide Squad may ultimately count themselves among the fortunate winners from the Gunn saga as well. Though many still defend Ayer and long for an Ayer cut of the first film, the consensus seems to be that 2016’s Suicide Squad was a misfire. Of course the second film has plenty of people lined up to hate it too, including those who’ve been sending Gunn death threats over his promise to kill off a bunch of characters. But Gunn’s sensibilities seem perfectly suited to what DC wants The Suicide Squad to be and there’s big reason to be optimistic about the writer-director's vision for the film, even if he kills off a few fan favorites in the process.
