How the heck did Suicide Squad become the best part of DC?
Holy reboot, Batman. With Warner Bros. on the verge of yet another DC reformulation, it’s worth remembering that one of their biggest gambles paid off
Film Features Suicide Squad
There comes a time when we all have to eat a little crow.
In 2016, Suicide Squad stumbled out of the DC Comics canon with an overzealous attempt to make a ragtag team of anti-heroes into box office stallions. Armed with a splashy trailer and a soundtrack packed with needle-drops from the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and today, David Ayer’s film was a big, surprising box office hit—one that critics brushed off, and the Snyder Cut faithful regarded with muted enthusiasm.
Ahead of its release, critics trashed the movie and dismissed it as an attempt at pulling a Guardians Of The Galaxy. However, as Vulture noted at the time, “it’s a faulty comparison: The Guardians were just minor players, whereas the Squad has a long history of franchise failure.” This one looked like another stillborn DCEU entry for the pile. Suicide Squad’s production was an array of competing interests. One source told The Hollywood Reporter in 2016, “[former Warner Bros. head Kevin Tsujihara] was really pissed about damage to the brand.” Apparently, no one at Warners thought Suicide Squad delivered “on the fun, edgy tone promised in the strong teaser trailer.”
Suicide Squad offered yet another example of DC putting the cart before the horse in hopes of getting the DC cinematic universe moving without properly setting it up. NPR wrote, “Suicide Squad should have been DC’s answer to Guardians Of The Galaxy or Ant-Man — a low-pressure romp through the weirder corners of its superbeing sandbox, unencumbered by brand-maintenance obligations,” The film’s garish edge-lord stylization, franchise focus, and onset antics from method acting’s worst spokesperson, Jared Leto, were at odds with each other, a real Suicide Squad of ideas—and this one never figured out how to beat Enchantress. So how did the bottom-of-the-barrel superhero movie become the best franchise in WB’s utility belt?
James Gunn gave Suicide Squad a heart and plenty of blood
Over the next four years, Suicide Squad would build its micro-universe within the larger DC mythos, becoming one of the few post-Snyder properties to expand the cinematic universe in creative ways. The move didn’t separate it from the goings on of the larger world, but the over-stylized aesthetic allowed its characters and filmmakers room to grow. This post-modern approach made for the most coherent and cohesive series of superhero stories, particularly on television, where the episodic nature of comic books is a more natural fit. All it needed was a little perspective.
After turning two idiosyncratic Marvel movies into massive cultural events complete with theme park rides, James Gunn became the target of a right-wing troll campaign that cost him his job at Disney. Disney’s loss was DC’s gain. Gunn managed to make fucking Groot a character popular enough to support a snack at Disneyland, and he would be the guy to figure out getting audiences on board with Rick Flag.
Gunn’s sensibility felt right not because of his work on Guardians but because of Super, his irreverent, sadistic superhero pastiche from 2011, where the director effectively finds a grounded perspective for his superheroes. He places them on the fringe of society and pins them with realistic problems, such as poverty, mental illness, and plain, old-fashioned pessimism. Superheroics are part of their problem, and they aren’t anyone’s solution.
By the time Gunn’s The Suicide Squad made it to HBO Max, expectations for the film were through the roof. Warners sunk another $185 million into more Suicide Squad and had yet to see any returns on investment. But the movie’s mix of gleeful, cynical violence and deep sincerity and love for its characters reflected the other successes in its universe (and Gunn says that “billions” saw it on HBO, so maybe this was the right approach). It had its heart in realism about the frustrations of being forced to do a job that’s deadly with people you don’t trust. And that frustration is all over Peacemaker.
With Peacemaker, Gunn returned to the same perspective he gave to Super, making superheroics a calling for insecure extroverts trying to prove their worth to a society that reviles them. “Sometimes I think I’m insecure in my masculinity, so I’m making up for it by having a dangerous pet,” Peacemaker (John Cena) says. “Like one of those knuckle-dicks in Georgia with a tiger on a leash.” The heavy stakes in Peacemaker and Suicide Squad feel grounded in humanity and strong observations of the superhero world. Peacemaker exists in a world where parental neglect and Batmite sit comfortably side by side. It doesn’t feel like someone forcing their vision on the characters, but rather showing how elastic these characters can be.
Everything about The Suicide Squad corner of the DC universe feels fresh and original in ways superhero movies don’t anymore. It allows itself to have fun with these characters, their lore, and what it means to have Vigilante in the same universe as Man Of Steel. The show has a looseness and freedom that gives way to a natural anarchic energy. Anything can happen, and it would make sense.
The fantabulous emancipation of Harley Quinn
Suicide Squad’s first sequel, Birds Of Prey, improved upon the original film by putting Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn front and center. Director Cathy Yan locks the audience into Quinn’s perspective, avoiding the same sexist pitfalls of numerous other incarnations of the character. Instead, Yan allows Quinn to tell her story, marvel at breakfast sandwiches, and wear clothes that make killing a little more comfortable.
Quinn’s perspective drives the film, allowing the mayhem to breathe a little. Like the best superhero movies, Yan allowed audiences to see through the character’s eyes and relate to them on their terms. It’s a breakup movie about finding strength through friends and personal growth. Released in February 2020, the film never really overcame the whole world-ending pandemic that overshadowed the box office, which also claimed the box office returns of The Suicide Squad. However, it did provide fans with a spin-off cartoon series that, over three seasons, has become one of the best shows on TV.
Locked away in DC’s now-defunct streaming service, Harley Quinn quickly became a cult favorite, earning buzz among fans and critics. That success is due to Suicide Squad’s willingness to blow these characters up a little bit (sometimes literally), giving showrunners Justin Halpern and Patrick Schumacker the freedom to play with everything in the DC canon—no matter how stupid. And that playfulness has paid off. Harley Quinn plays with such a deep bench of characters that the show ends up joking and commenting on three generations of DC canon in the same scene.
But it isn’t simply about how many things the show can reference, but how Harley Quinn makes all incarnations of these characters valid pieces of the mythos’ tapestry. In the brilliant “Batman Begins Forever” episode, Harley (Kaley Cuoco) enters Bruce Wayne’s psyche to discover a grim and gritty perspective, complete with the original backgrounds from Batman: The Animated Series. There, Quinn discovers young Bruce is forever trapped in a memory loop, rewatching the death of his parents. Tapping into her psychologist training (though she learned more from watching Fraiser, the episode’s opening moments tease), Quinn walks young Bruce through his repressed memories, examining bits of Batman’s past, including Batman Begins, his Detective Comics debut, and the 1966 TV series. Admittedly, he had a few weird years, but seeing everything he’s done “all smushed together” impresses Quinn.
The result isn’t just another excuse to mock Batman’s goofiness, his savior complex, or his ridiculous belief that breaking someone’s arm is going to stop crime. It’s that these characters can evolve or devolve as much as they need. In the end, Batman still struggles with a relatable, human problem: A fear of being alone, misunderstood, and powerless.
There’s a juxtaposition throughout the show between character psychology and gleeful violence. Characters get away with the carnage while the show layers in more pro-therapy language and themes that Dr. Harleen Quinzel would know and understand. It’s not just an excuse to psychologize these characters but rather tapping into a fundamental truth about the character: She’s a psychologist with homicidal tendencies and would see the world in these terms.
But the heart of the show is the relationship between Harley and Poison Ivy (Lake Bell), which is startlingly mature, not in a prurient way but rather an emotionally intelligent one. The pair have realistic lovers’ spats that just happen to come up when entering Swamp Thing’s The Green or when they spot Harley’s ex, The Joker (Alan Tudyk), at a bar. Their lives and problems are given real dimension, where they must grow as characters to work their way back to stasis, adding weight and perspective to what should be a run-of-the-mill cash-in. It exceeds expectations by delivering on quality, both in terms of its story and its jokes, which, it should be noted, are very funny.
These shows prove that from the remnants of the Snyderverse, good things can happen. These investments are paying off. Though Suicide Squad’s initial incarnation was off-putting to some, in the end, it’s just another art piece for Batman’s gallery, one that’s a small piece in living history that can’t be undone by a misfire that led to one of the most profound moments in The Caped Crusader’s recent past.
If Warner Bros. Discovery is, once again, rebooting the DC universe to create its own version of Marvel, it’s reassuring knowing that Peacemaker and Harley Quinn will return to screens in their current states. Suicide Squad might have started as an example of superhero bloat and craven cash-ins, but it has grown beyond that. By treating their characters and audience respectfully, DC’s made something special: good movies and TV shows, not homework for what comes next.
78 Comments
Calling the animated Harley Quinn a spin-off of Suicide Squad (or Birds of Prey) feels like a huge stretch.
Especially considering how DC animation has been consistently knocking it out of the park for the last 30 years. They could have just copied the animated Suicide Squad movie for the live action one and it would have turned out much better. Heck, the Justice League show had a single episode that focused on the Suicide Squad and it had great characters who played well off of each other, great pacing, great action, and tied into a bigger overarching plot.
I love that episode.Tangent: I love Justice League Unlimited. And to piggy back off your point, that and the preceding Justice League cartoon demonstrated how you COULD skip the solo/origin movies and jump right into the team-up if you treat the characters like three-dimensional beings and embrace the goofy comic bookiness of the source material.
“Hey GL, could you tell Hawkgirl I said hello?”
So many people forget that long before Iron Man, DC were actually the first ones to solve a shared on-screen superhero universe. As much love as BTAS gets (and deservedly so), I actually feel like what Superman: The Animated Series achieved was a bit more impressive: they put Superman on screen in a way that felt tonally consistent with the existing Batman series, but was also quintessentially Superman.I get why Warner felt their best path forward was to try to construct a cinematic universe around the success of The Dark Knight trilogy, thematically if not canonically. But just imagine where we’d be today if instead they’d followed the template they themselves had already invented. Naturally there are things you can do with animation that are harder to pull off with live action, but I have to think it could’ve been done and done well.
I always figured it was the one property that WB didn’t care enough to fuck with too much, and their decision to let Gunn have it was a kind of “fuck it, why not?”
It’s almost as if you get good results when you let creative people be creative.
That’s traditionally been WB’s approach. The problem is when they let people like Snyder be “creative.”
According to Gunn, DC/WB basically offered him whatever property he wanted, including Superman. He picked Suicide Squad because he’s a fan of the comics, and also (my speculation here) his writing is strongest with ensembles.
This. The Suicide Squad was like a grounded, R-rated Guardians of the Galaxy.
I mean they literally took the film away from Ayer and handed it over to a company that edits trailers. Toby Emmerich had a huge boner for Gunn for some reason, and wanted him to do Superman. But Gunn wanted to do TSS, so Gunn was basically given carte blanche by Emmerich to do whatever he wanted.
And before they took it away, they fast-tracked it into production. The Suicide Squad a big-budget, live action summer blockbuster before Wonder Woman. For whatever reason, yeah the Squad was a property they very much cared about.
However, it did provide fans with a spin-off cartoon seriesDid it? Apart from having the same main character (who are played very differently) I’m not seeing a lot of “spin-off” here.
Not to mention that the cartoon came before the film.
It is my favorite (non Batman or Spiderman) Superhero movie since probably Infinity War (I like endgame but didn’t love it as much as most). Ratcatcher 2 and Bloodsport interaction was so great. Hopefully Ratcatcher 2 kills in in season 2 of Peacemaker.
Sorry to run away on a tangent, but I feel seen by your comment that Infinity War is better than Endgame. I’d even go as far as saying it’s the best Avengers movie.
It is to me as well and probably my favorite Marvel movie.
I’m sure I’m the only one who feels this way but the focus on the Harley/Ivy relationship in the newest HQ season really did it no favors.
Because the rest of it was truly terrible!!
Beat me to it. LOW BAR, anyone??
How the heck did Suicide Squad become the best part of DC?I mean…have you seen the rest of the DC universe?
There’s Doom Patrol, though…
Gotta admit here that I’m a pretty big fan of the general vibe of the Doom Patrol comics and have never been able to be assed to sign up for what ever streamer is carrying the show or to pirate it despite only hearing mostly good reviews.Putting stuff where people will see it matters.
I mean, HBO Max isn’t some obscure little service. That’s like me complaining that I didn’t see Wandavision because I don’t have Disney+.
I’m not saying that it’s wildly hard to find, although I guess my final comment does sound kind of like that. It was really a broader complaint about how sprawling the streaming landscape has gotten and HBO max is one of the places I drew the line on not wanting to get another subscription.
And you can’t get it in the UK 🙁
Doom Patrol is on HBO Max.
Doom Patrol is the one oddly fun cousin you visit during family parties. They don’t leave their room, you barely see them at dinner, but it was sure as fun when you got to just hang out in their lair and play with all the cool stuff around.
Their streaming shows are pretty good in general. Not just Doom Patrol but Swamp Thing (which should not have been canceled), Watchmen, Sandman, and Peacemaker.Plus their animation has always been fantastic. Hopefully the cuts to WB animation won’t affect them too much.
It’s a weird situation where DC has a lot of success in the TV space, but their shows tend to get dismissed and overlooked because they’re not connected.
Except the Berlantiverse shows, which are dismissed and overlooked now but (IMO) were a lot of fun when they were operating at peak performance a few years ago, and even pulled off Crisis on Infinite Earths in a satisfying way.
How the hell did Gunn’s Suicide Squad and Peacemaker be the best that DCEU offers as well as better than anything that’s come out of the MCU since Endgame.
I could argue that I think a few post Endgame Marvel shows are better the Gunn’s Suicide Squad but I can’t deny that Peacemaker beats them all hands down.
The Suicide Squad >>> Peacemaker
better than anything that’s come out of the MCU since Endgame
Cut out the nostalgia fest (which that’s all that film really had) and you’re left with an empty shell of a film.
Yes, if you cut out the entire movie, there isn’t much left of the film. Complaining about the nostalgia in No Way Home is like complaining about the silliness in The Suicide Squad. It’s the movie they decided to make.
But the problem is that nostalgia is not substance. It’s cheap pops.
Plot relevant nostalgia, though! Seriously, Peter was going to send the Sinister Five back to their deaths but the “Great responsibility” speech by Aunt May and re-iterated by his own multiverse variants as their Uncle Ben’s dying words made him decide to “cure some ass”. Even the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man saving MCU Pete from killing Norman made him decide he had to cure him because he had the great power & responsibility. Even Amazing Spider-Man was able to get closure on the death of Gwen by saving MJ. It’s not empty nostalgia, it’s story/character relevant.
Agree to disagree. I know that film is popular, but for me it was a bland, boring, cheap nostalgia fest.MCU in phase 4 has been complete dogshit in my view.
I know that film is popular…And critically acclaimed.
I’m sorry it didn’t work for you, and I don’t completely disagree with your final sentence. I just hate the construction of “if you take out the part that so many people liked, it really sucks” since that’s true of all films. And, like it or not, I don’t think that anyone can seriously claim that the nostalgia of No Way Home was a tacked-on element that didn’t belong in the film—the entire film is geared to culminate in those moments of nostalgia.
How is it a spin-off? In the movie, King Shark sounds and acts completely different than he does on the show. Even Harley is played differently. Aside from the appearance and voice of Harley, there is nothing in common with either.
Not to mention, The Suicide Squad was still in production and Birds of Prey hadn’t yet been released when Harley Quinn made its debut in November 2019. If anything, the Harley Quinn series was put out to soften the ground for BoP and TSS.
I liked his Suicide Squad but Peacemaker was fantastic.
Birds of Prey was …not great. But the rest of the stuff mentioned (The Suicide Squad , Harley Peacemaker are fantastic , Throw in Doom Patrol instead (which is actually funny and well written, and I mean Rita Farr kind of shows up in the current episode of Harley Quinn so it vaugely ties in).
Birds of Prey should have cut out Huntress, Montoya, and Black Canary entirely, and should have been an on-the-run road movie with just Harley and Cass being hounded by Black Mask. Everything else in that movie is pointless and extraneous. It boggles my mind that people consider it a high point of anything, rather than just another mediocre, overstuffed slog with one good scene (the jailhouse breakout).
Agreed. I really, really wanted to like Birds of Prey but found it interminable. Harley is a character who works well in small doses and having her dominate the whole film, along with the black hole of charisma that was Cassandra.Needed more Huntress. Much more.
The Harley cartoon and Peacemaker are the only two things that I’ve enjoyed. The Suicide Squad wasn’t very good. Harley live action wasn’t good. I like Margot Robie, and she does a good Harley….but the films just weren’t any good. And the Batman movie? Cut it down to under 2 hours. I don’t get more value for a longer movie. Maybe take a cue from Harley animated and Peacemaker: Everything doesn’t have to be dark and dreary
I enjoyed The Suicide Squad far more than I expected, and probably feel more positively about it given what a surprise it was. I was fully entertained, that’s for sure.
Honestly I expected to love it, I am a huge fan of James Gunn’s work going way back(I still watch The Specials at least once a year) but for some reason it did not hit with me. It made both me and my wife very hesitant on Peacemaker but we turned it one night and were hooked very quickly. That show is just a blast
I liked The Suicide Squad but lockdown must have given James Gunn a huge shot of creativity, because Peacemaker just blows it out of the water. Maybe he felt a huge amount of pressure to replicate Guardians of the Galaxy for DC, because Peacemaker is much more it’s own thing, and stronger for it.
I liked TSS, but I think it pointed out how the constraints Marvel put on him actually did Gunn some favors. The borderline excessive “our ‘heroes’ gleefully murder people” montages from Guardians 1 and 2 are allowed to keep going and going and going in TSS, often to the point of monotony. A lot of the jokes are simply “Idris Elba said fuck again! Isn’t that great?” Now, I love profanity, I love Idris Elba, and—as someone who’s currently introducing his sons to The Wire—I love the intersection of Elba and the word “fuck.” But there needs to be more to a joke than that.
I don’t recall if Idris Elba said “fuck” in The Losers – pretty sure somebody did, though – but it’s a fun movie regardless, and gives us yet another Chris Evans’ take on a Marvel character.
DC. The Losers is a DC comic.
The Losers was DC, not marvel
James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad is the best DC superhero movie since the Nolanverse ended. Nothing else has even come close. Large parts of ‘Wonder Woman’ are a lot of fun, but still, it doesn’t come close..
TSS was a breath of fresh air compared to the 2016 SS, but yeah I feel your personal evaluation of the film hinges very much on how close to/far from 14 years old you are.
The Dirty Dozen, But With Supervillains is just a great premise.
To paraphrase a remark made by lightninglouie, The Dirty Dozen, but with Supervillains, in an expensive Troma film.
Isn’t this one super obvious? WB drank the kool-aid DC has been using to sell their busts of Alex Ross covers, that the big heroes of DC are more like icons of virtues than fun heroes, so they have to be represented as such all the time. Suicide Squad is in the weird position of being something they’re willing to put on screen (like they could have this same success over and over with Doom Patrol, Teen Titans, Legion of Super Heroes, anything fun and slightly irreverent, but instead they keep bashing their heads against how to make Batman the gritty dead parent rage golem they think people actually want.
I am not sure even that is the case because while Alex Ross’ art is epic and iconic, I still feel they represent the inherent good in the characters. I feel like the exec at the WB still sit in a dark room reading “The Dark Knight Returns” and “Watchman” only and thing everything needs to be dark and brooding. I never feel like Alex Ross’ take on Superman is those things
I agree with you fully. That’s what makes Ross a genuine master of his craft. He’s able to portray characters as epic and iconic, while also displaying their humanity and emotional depth.
This is a pretty good and nuanced take but I have also just realized that I want an incredibly dumb series about the Legion of Doom.
Which, speaking of all of this, they need to fucking film Kingdom Come already.
I think it’s a lot simpler than that: they just felt like following the success of the Dark Knight trilogy, that needed to be the basis for their shared universe, thematically if not canonically. And you can’t really fault them for that approach. Snyder was just the wrong guy.
Harley Quinn premiered three months before Birds of Prey. That is only one of many reasons why it’s not a spin-off.
Misspelled Doom Patrol
The Suicide Squad was good if you’re a 13-year-old edgelord. The movie is basically just gore and dick jokes. So it’s extra ironic Ayer’s film (which remember was messed around with by WB, shocker) is getting called “edgelord” by this writer.
There was more to The Suicide Squad than that—for all the graphic violence and over-the-top lunacy, there was also poignancy as the Squad members confronted just what a bunch of Four-Star Fuckups they are, and that when it came to being bad guys they were outdone in every possible way by Amanda Waller, who condoned Peacemaker killing Flagg for no higher reason than to cover her ass. It took Starro escaping and wreaking havoc for them to pull together as a team and actually, for once, be heroes. I’m neither thirteen years old nor an Edgelord, and I liked this movie a lot better than its earlier incarnation or anything Zack Snyder had a hand in in the earlier DCEU.
The movie is basically just gore and dick jokes. Why, it’s almost as if it was a James Gunn film.
If no one else is going to mention it, Patrick Schumacker and Justin Halpern were writers/exec producers on the short-lived Powerless (which recently dropped for free on the CW streaming channel.). It’s goofy, a little cheesy, and looks like it cost about $10 per episode, but does the same off-center world-building as their later work on Harley Quinn.
I’m serious; the ep about discovering that Superman’s about to fly backwards to reverse time so everyone in the office gets a “do-over” day is one of the best things I’ve seen come out of live-action DC in a very long time. 🙂
My favorite adaptation of the Suicide Squad remains “Task Force X”, the episode from the Justice League cartoon. It’s just a lean, quickly-paced, lower-stakes (well, lower than either film version, anyway) supervillain heist that wraps up in a half-hour. I wish they would’ve spun off a show from that episode.
I just want JAmes Gunn to release the Funches Cut of Suicide Squad
NGL Batman The Brave And The Bold is my favourite Suicide Squad spinoff.
Because James Gunn is better at his job than anyone else in their stable.
BvS > MoS > Aquaman > ZSJL > Shazam > WW > SS > WW84 > TSS
The second Suicide Squad movie is better not just because James Gunn got the vibe right but because the film followed the concept correctly. The Squad is a covert force that the public and the super heroes aren’t supposed to know about. Running around in a city in the first film is far too exposed. And why didn’t Superman or any other hero notice a city was in danger? The second film and the Peacemaker series capture the feel of the 80s incarnation of the Squad. The Birds of Prey film should have just been called Harley Quinn and set up a Birds film for later on. That confused the audience.