#James Gunn Killed Anyone He Wanted – /Film

One of the best sneak peeks that came out of DC FanDome back in August was our first look at James Gunn‘s anticipated The Suicide Squad. Not only does the movie look wild as hell, but it has an incredible ensemble cast at the center of it that includes the return of Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, Viola Davis as Amanda Waller, Jai Courtney as Captain Boomerang, and Joel Kinnaman as Rick Flagg, not to mention newcomers like Idris Elba, David Dastmalchian, John Cena, Michael Rooker, and more. But don’t get too attached to them.

Director James Gunn recently revealed that Warner Bros. Pictures and DC Entertainment gave him “full freedom to kill anyone” in this movie. With such a huge cast of characters, you can bet that plenty of them won’t make it to the end of the movie. But you probably won’t be too sad to see some of them go, because as Gunn explains, unlike with the Guardians of the Galaxy, there are some truly bad guys. Find out all The Suicide Squad details that were recently revealed, along with some new images, below.

Empire‘s latest cover issue dives into The Suicide Squad, which has yet again been confirmed to be “its own thing” outside of David Ayer’s Suicide Squad movie from 2016. However, as Gunn notes, “It does not contradict the first movie, I don’t think. It might in some small ways… I don’t know…” That sounds like Gunn didn’t have to worry about any continuity issues or anything like that from the first movie. Since there weren’t really many dangling narrative threads (or much of a coherent story) in that first movie, that probably wasn’t too difficult to navigate anyway.

Honestly, it sounds like Gunn didn’t have to worry much about any creative interference in this movie. As the director compared his take on Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy to The Suicide Squad, he revealed just how much freedom he had with these characters. Gunn said:

“I think you know, from pretty close to the beginning, that all of the Guardians are good – apart from Nebula, who’s the outlier. But in The Suicide Squad, some of the characters end up being good, some end up being terrible. They don’t just get in fights and say they’re going to kill each other, they actually do get in fights and kill each other. You really don’t know who’s going to live and who’s going to die. I was given full freedom to kill anyone – and I mean anyone – by DC.”

Even though Gunn can kill anyone in The Suicide Squad, don’t expect him to take out all of the characters from Ayer’s Suicide Squad just so we can have a fresh slate. Not only is Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn probably too valuable of a character to kill off, but there’s one thing that Gunn really liked about that first movie that will probably keep him from killing everyone from the first outing. He explained:

“Listen, David Ayer’s gotten trouble for the movie. I know it didn’t come out how David wanted it to come out. But he did one really, really great thing, and that is he picked fantastic actors to work with, and he dealt with these actors in building their characters in a really deep and fearless way. It’s something David definitely deserves to be lauded for, and it’s definitely added to this movie.”

We’re betting Gunn will be lauded plenty for his take on The Suicide Squad, but we’ll have to wait awhile before we find out since the movie isn’t slated to be released in theaters (or what’s left of them) on August 6, 2021. If you’d like to know more about the assembly of new characters coming to The Suicide Squad, check out our rundown over here.

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