What if James Gunn has revealed the ending of The Suicide Squad and the fates of his characters before there's even been a trailer for the upcoming DC sequel? On August 6, 2021, the Guardians Of The Galaxy director's take on The Suicide Squad will be released as a standalone sequel to David Ayer's Suicide Squad and he's already primed fans to expect something explosive. And a detail in the newly released logo for The Suicide Squad may well hint at the film's ending.
Despite the name, Ayer's version of the squad - some of whom are returning for the follow-up - mostly survived his 2016 Suicide Squad film, with only Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), El Diablo (Jay Hernandez), and Slipknot (Adam Beach) killed off. For the sequel, James Gunn has already teased that the film will live up to its name, releasing his cast list on Twitter in September 2019 with the ominous tagline "don't get too attached..." And it makes sense because this is a team put together to tackle high-risk black ops missions with a high chance of death, and in the comics, members of Task Force X often die.
There's a good chance James Gunn wants his potential audience to know what they're getting in for, and that his warning not to get too attached really does mean lots of his The Suicide Squad characters are going to die. And he's now subtly doubled down on that doom-mongering message in the logo of The Suicide Squad because that logo is an Easter Egg pointing to a movie influence that's impossible to ignore.
In the wake of the announcement of David Ayer's Suicide Squad, the director told fans to expect "the Dirty Dozen with supervillains" and it seems James Gunn is taking a similar line. Not only does his logo include a nod to the comics-accurate Suicide Squad logo from the 1980s with the gunshots peppered through it, but it's also made up of the same font and colored with almost the exact same vivid red as The Dirty Dozen. The black border is also reminiscent of Robert Aldrich's classic war movie and that movie logo was riddled with holes well before either Suicide Squad's comics or The A-Team did it. Is James Gunn forewarning everyone that his take on The Suicide Squad will owe even more to The Dirty Dozen than his predecessor's?
Given how big the cast list is and rumors from the set that there may be more than one supervillain squad involved in Gunn's story, it would be fitting for The Suicide Squad to kill the majority of its characters. Aside from Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn, Gunn probably has mostly free rein, even in terms of those returning Suicide Squad characters (though killing Amanda Waller would be a disaster) and it would be a huge statement to kill most if not all of his cast. That really would live up to the film's title and billing and it would ensure that any future sequels to The Suicide Squad solve the issue of over-dependency on the continuity of the DCEU.
