Suicide Squad 2: Why You Aren't Supposed To Recognize The Villain

James Gunn's The Suicide Squad has already set itself apart from the first movie in a major meaningful way: it's almost entirely centered around unknown supervillains. The film is neither a reboot nor a direct sequel to 2016's critically panned Suicide Squad, but instead a re-imagining of the titular team that shares a few characters and castings from the first movie. The movie went through several different potential directors, including a return from David Ayer as well as bizarre rumors suggesting that none other than Mel Gibson might take on the project. Finally, after being hired to write the film in October of 2018, James Gunn officially signed on to direct the movie in January of the following year.

Like most of the upcoming films in DC's release slate, not much is known about the actual narrative of The Suicide Squad. For a while, the only information that many fans had was the cast list: a massive ensemble made up of names such as Idris Elba, Margot Robbie, Taika Waititi, and many more. However, the full roster for this incarnation of the team was released at DC FanDome, revealing shocking character additions such as Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior), Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchain), Weasel (Sean Gunn — the director's brother), among others. The director likened the spirit of the movie to "gritty 70's war films," putting fans in the mind of movies such Platoon and Apocalypse Now.

It's obvious that James Gunn chose not to use the same roster as David Ayer's film, with the only returning characters being Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Rick Flagg (Joel Kinnaman), Digger Harkness (Jai Courtney), and Amanda Waller (Viola Davis). The rest of the roster is made up of obscure D-list DC supervillains, although the reasoning behind that choice is more complex than it may initially seem.

At FanDome, Gunn commented on the movie's relative lack of well-known villains, pointing out that there's a greater chance to provide growth and depth to characters who the general audience isn't really aware of. There's an inherent expectation of personality when you bring a character like The Joker or Lex Luthor to the screen, but with the likes of Polka-Dot Man and Bloodsport (Idris Elba), he has more room to provide them with characterization built from the ground up. The movie can allow the characters to grow on the audience naturally through the storytelling — as opposed to the audience being familiar with the villains from the get-go, requiring the movie to meet preconceived expectations.

Gunn also pointed out that there's an innate tragedy to the movie being about "second-rate antagonists" (similar to John Ostrander's original comic book run) who are outright ignored by the wider public. To the Guardians of the Galaxy filmmaker, there's more intrigue in telling a story about "supervillains who aren't even that good at being bad." Beyond this, however, there's an even more nefarious reason behind Gunn's choice to build his team using supervillain rejects.

A big draw of the Suicide Squad in the comics (and something that fans hoped David Ayer would tackle) is the idea that each of them are expendable, meaning that any of the team's members could die at any moment. However, Suicide Squad failed to capitalize on this as most of the team's members were very well-known and beloved characters, making it easy to recognize just which characters were going to be casually killed off (most infamously, Slipknot). James Gunn now has a chance to rectify this, as his team of mostly D-listers is perfect for a narrative that forces the audience to get attached to them only to pick them off one by one in both cruel and hilarious ways. While DC and James Gunn have done a great job at keeping the story of The Suicide Squad under wraps, one thing is for certain: audiences can expect to see a lot of characters meet their untimely demise on-screen.

More: Is The Suicide Squad A Sequel, Remake, Reboot, or Standalone Story?