Who would have thought that Kal-El might have appeared in The Suicide Squad? Well, James Gunn wanted to make this a reality. Gunn reveals Superman was the initial big bad for the film instead of Starro the Conqueror in a new interview.
On the latest episode of the Script Apart, a podcast that talks to writers about the evolution of their scripts, The Suicide Squad director James Gunn mentions, “There was a time when I thought The Suicide Squad should fight Superman,” he says. He continues explaining why Starro was a much better choice.
“I thought that was a very interesting story. Then I came up with Starro. He’s a character I love from the comics. I think he’s a perfect comic book character because he’s absolutely ludicrous but also very scary in his own way. What he does is scary. He used to scare the crap out of me when I was a child, putting those facehuggers on Superman and Batman. So I thought he was one of the major, major DC villains that was probably never going to be put into another movie. And if they did, it’d have been a ‘black cloud’ version of Starro. Not a giant walking starfish, a kaiju that’s bright pink and cerulean blue, this ridiculously big, bright bad guy.”
Not only did Gunn think Starro was a better fit, but he talks about how the character of Superman is still feeling its way around the DCEU. “At the time, there were a lot of questions like, ‘Who is Superman in the DCEU? Is this movie outside the DCEU?’, and I just didn’t want to deal with it all that much,” Gunn said. “I just wanted to tell a good story.”
What kind of movie would The Suicide Squad have been with Superman as an antagonist? Let us know in the comments!
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