James Gunn almost made Superman the villain in The Suicide Squad
Starro wasn't always supposed to be the big bad in The Suicide Squad
Film News Suicide Squad
The Suicide Squad introduced plenty of characters who hadn’t had their chance to shine onscreen, from Peacemaker to Polka-Dot Man. But perhaps the biggest surprise for DC fans was seeing Starro The Conqueror as the villain that the squad battles. James Gunn proved that a giant starfish can actually be pretty intimidating—and his inclusion inadvertently gave the very timely message that if you just cover your damn face, you won’t die (… from having Starro’s face-huggers sucking on your face to mind-control you). However, it turns out Gunn initially wanted a very different “villain” to face off against the squad: Superman.
While on the podcast Script Apart, The Suicide Squad’s writer and director talked about how, before choosing Starro as the villain, he thought the Suicide Squad should fight Superman. He believed that it would be “a very interesting story.” Ultimately, he scrapped the idea when he realized that Starro would make a far better villain to fight. “When I came up with Starro, he’s a character I love from the comics. I think he’s the perfect comic book character, because absolutely ludicrous but he’s also very scary in his own way,” he explained.
Gunn read the comics while growing up and he remembering thinking that Starro and his mind control powers were terrifying back then. “What he does is scary,” Gunn said. “He used to scare the crap out of me when I was a child, putting those face-huggers on Superman and Batman and stuff. 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, they would do it like, the black cloud version of Starro. Not a giant walking starfish, a kaiju that is bright pink and cerulean blue, just ridiculously big, bright bad guy.”
Having Superman be the villain wouldn’t be a bad fit; if anything, it’d feel reminiscent of the critically acclaimed Harley Quinn animated series. But Starro forces the squad to prove their abilities, with an intense and very entertaining face-off in the movie’s final moments.
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“But Starro forces the squad to prove their abilities”
What?
I didn’t think “Supes” was a villain per se of the Harley Quinn series, just a sort of all-American blockhead. Sort of like the Venture Bros take on the guy.
Yeah he shows up in the Robin episode and as pal of the JL to send Ivy to the Phantom Zone but he isn’t really an antagonist.The show has a very Venture Bros dynamic when it comes to heroes and villains. It’s more like a 9 to 5 job.
Like this?
Ooh, I get that reference! I’d like to imagine him and Foxy married and she basically dominates him for eternity. While solving mysteries.
We’ll always have Paris…That’s what we called it when I smashed his penis with a lead model of the Eiffel Tower.
Holy shit that cut is deeeeeeeeep. Mad respect.
So many people disliked that show and I adored it, warts and all.
There was some stuff that would probably not fly today.
I wish Kid Notorious was on DVD or something.
That’s what I liked about “Superman: Red Son” (comic and movie). Having Supes grow up under Stalinism and adopting its values rather than American ones brings up the problems with having a jingoistic superhero dedicated to the “way” of a nation.
One day, hopefully, I can see someone bring up Red Son and not feel angry about the ‘twist’ at the end.
Wow. Superman, but villain. Fresh take.
Yeah, if only Hollywood would so something that’s never been done before, like make movies about the little-known origin stories behind Batman or Spider-man.
I like the way you think, kid. Here’s the equivalent of a small country’s gross national product.
I think we’re over a dozen times that Thomas & Martha Wayne have been gunned down on TV/film/animation…?
What?!? When!!?!?
Brightburn- really good movie but super violent/gory.
I like this version. The Teen Titans first save the Waynes to prevent Batman from coming into existence and then have to undo it. Robin giving the “thumb up” at the end really cracks me up.
That is surprisingly dark for a kids’ movie and I love it.
My Batman origin script involves Martha & Thomas dying from slipping in the shower. Different showers, different times – see, that’s the twist.SHIT MONEY DOWN MY THROAT, WARNER BROS, YOU FUCKING PUSSIES. MY IDEA’S NOT ANY WORSE THAN THE OTHER SHIT YOU’VE BEEN EXTRUDING OUT.
A traumatised Bruce swears to prevent any more deaths like his parents’, and becomes Matman. He is not invited to join the Justice League.
At least. One of the things that I loved about Spider-man: Homecoming was the absolute handwaving that they did over his origin story. “How did you get your powers again?” “A radioactive spider bit me, but I don’t want to talk about it.”
Basically acknowledging that anyone in the audience who doesn’t know the basics of his powers would probably not understand anything else going on in the movie either, like the fact that he is in high school and is human.
Wait, how did Batman begin? How did Spiderman get his powers? I’ve never known these things./S
lol Gunn produced a movie where that was the whole plot
I seriously am tired of “What if Superman were Evil?”. It’s been so overused at this point for the past decade that the idea of Superman played straight seems more like a genuine subversion. Gunn made the right decision to use Starro. They need to actually play Superman as Superman for a couple years. Trying to make a subversion of the character when you haven’t even established what you’re supposed to be subverting is a terrible idea.
What people like Zack Snyder fail to see is the reason Superman is so scary if he turned evil is because he is such a beacon for hope.
Zack Snyder doesn’t understand hope, or aspirational heroes, or that some people can just inherently be decent and honest.
He probably hates Ted Lasso (because, as someone tweeted, the pitch of “what if a man was nice” sounds like science fiction).
You hit the nail on the head here. The biggest problem with evil Superman (aside from extreme over-saturation) is that the people who want to do an evil Superman story are almost always people who don’t really like or even know regular Superman. They are incapable of telling us what it means to lose Superman because he means nothing to them. They can just tell us how much physical destruction he can do. That doesn’t make for a good story. It just makes for “badass” art in comics and computer effects in movies. There’s no substance there. I mean, it’s not a huge leap for the people inhabiting the world of a Superman who, for instance, killed millions and flattened Metropolis in the world’s most destructive slap fight with Michael Shannon to then see him go evil. To that world, Superman has logically always been more of a lesser evil than a savior. To anyone who saw that, Superman turning evil had to happen eventually. Whereas, the Superman who talks people on ledges out of suicide, approaches everyone as a potential friend, sees violence as a last resort, flies enemies to space for fights in order to save human lives, pulls every punch to save the life of even his enemies, diverts lava flows to save villages and hangs out after just to say hi to the kids, saves occasional cats in trees, and is always just a little tormented by the idea that he could be doing more… That big blue boy scout Superman─an individual universally recognized as Earth’s champion, a man who is even more good than he is powerful─turning evil would make everyone feel truly helpless and a deep sense of loss would be felt by everyone on earth, even Lex Luthor. The shock and emotional devastation of that Superman turning evil would break the world’s heart and send everyone plunging into chaos and darkness. (Superman & Lois is doing a surprisingly good job of all of this, BTW.)
That’s a longer rant than intended. I guess it just makes me sad for humanity that popular fiction’s greatest symbol of goodness is thought of as only interesting when he’s evil and not more of an inspirational figure.
Exactly. Superman isn’t scary as a bad guy because he’s powerful; there are lots of powerful villains in the DC universe, including actual gods. Superman is scary as a bad guy because if this figure of ultimate virtue can’t maintain hope in the face of darkness, what hope do any of us have?I used to hate Superman as a character, and while he’s still not my favourite, I understand what he stands for a lot more these days.
Who says he’d be evil? The Suicide Squad is a band of villains organized by Amanda Waller who doesn’t necessarily like Superman.
I could see Superman being an antagonist in a Suicide Squad movie in the sense that he’s opposing the protagonists. Kind of like how Sam Wilson was a minor antagonist in Ant Man. But I feel like that sort of thing would work better when the DCEU establishes Superman as a character first.
Well, if you want to establish the Suicide Squad as heroes, then Superman has to be the villain.Although… it might be fun to have Deadshot realize two-thirds of the way through that they’re not only The Bad Guys, they’re working for the Biggest Bad of All in Amanda Waller, and help Superman turn the tide of…something big that Waller is willing to use to press an advantage. That requires that you see Waller as an out-and-out villain, though, rather than an antihero who genuinely believes she’s saving humanity from Scary Godlike Beings….
Yeah, I initially assumed he’d be the good guy and it would just be a villain protagonist movie. There are some potential issues with stakes and likability there, but nothing insurmountable. I think it could actually be a good twist on the superhero formula if they resisted the temptation to make Superman mind-controlled or super-naive and just let the natural conflict between the exemplar of justice and a squad of black ops assassins play out.
That’s the question. Would he have been a villain (no thank you) or an antagonist (could work)?
Agree 1000% with this, and this is why I get so angry with them for wasting Henry Cavill. Dude is legit the best Superman since Reeves and if we’d just given him a few movies of figuring himself out and being nice and not, you know, leveling cities and such…sigh.
I grew up with Christopher Reeve as Superman and have seen all the iterations from that point on, and I would have to say that Tylor Hoechlin is, for me, the best Superman I’ve ever seen in popular culture.
The worst part is that Cavill could be a great Superman if the scripts were better.
I look at him in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and wonder why they didn’t have him being as charismatic as he is there. Instead he’s just… dour thanks to plot.
Yeah, except this doesn’t make sense because suicide squad is a group of villains, so superman would still be the good guy. It’s just a change in perspective. How do you people not understand this?
Seriously, how about we get Superman back as the guy we all want to be and we all need and send him away for like 8 DC movies and then have Luthor and Batman bring him back to kick Darkseid’s ass to such a movie theater pop that people are throwing babies when he shows up. Then he cuts the best promo of his live right out of JLU “But you can take it, can’t ya, big man? What we have here is a rare opportunity for me to cut loose, and show you just how powerful I really am!”
He would be fighting a bunch of villains, why would that make him evil?
It would make him the bad guy In This Case, AntsNMyEyes.
It would make him the antagonist, not the villain. It seems like it’d be hard to really pull off well, because Superman would still have to be like Superman (and attempts to show how destructive he would be never really go over well with audiences because he’s such a revered character), but protagonist/antagonist only really depends on who the reader/viewer is sympathetic to.
“Antagonist” is a better word choice — I was just using the term originally used.
It would be really hard to make a version of Superman as virtuous antagonist who is faithful to the core of the character, though. In Man of Steel, because he was still the protagonist, he was inching toward antihero. I think that didn’t go over that well because collateral damage is something Superman is usually really careful about. Protecting people from Superman is almost more important to him than protecting the world from supervillains and definitely more important than protecting the world from itself.
And here I thought that was just Zack Snyder and his utter lack of talent.
Yeah, that’s still not the bad guy.
It wouldn’t necessarily, but considering this is still Warner-DC we’re talking about, and Warner-DC have spent pretty much the last decade and change desperately chasing the edgelord market as much as possible, I feel like people can be forgiven for believing that it would have probably trended in that direction.
I seriously am tired of “What if Superman were Evil?”.So, so fucking tired of this — even before it became ZackSnyder!’s go-to position.It’s like they’re justifying why we should just accept that the entire system is rotten and corrupt and just stay out of the way of evil rather than bothering to fight it.
I think a much more interesting concept with Superman is, “What if Superman is good, but his concept of good is different to ours?” Like, what if Superman were a prude, and wanted to burn every red light district to the ground (after getting the people to a safe distance, of course)? What if we still need him to protect us from the Bizarros and the Darkseids of the universe, but the trade off is having a hero who’ll stop us from being fallible little humans?
Except he wouldn’t be evil because he’d still be fighting a group of villains (suicide squad) which seems pretty obvious
Starro was perfect for TSS: incredibly powerful, and a bit scary … while being laughably absurd in the best possible way 🙂 I was actually a little sad when it was like, “I was totally cool floating around in space, till you assholes showed up …”
I’d say Starro wasn’t really a villain. He got majorly fucked over and was imprisoned and abused by humanity for decades. I would have killed them too. Plus it seemed he only wanted that one city. Not unreasonable!
#freestarro
*raises hand*He said “This city is mine.” a lot but nothing he said precluded adding more cities to his collection at a later date.
The reason Superman keeps getting subverted and altered and spun this way and that is that the character as-is is perfectly uninteresting and completely unusable. You can’t have a good story with the vanilla version of Superman in it, he doesn’t work.
The assumption, though, is that Superman would have been evil in the film. It’s entirely possible that Waller would have sent them to take out Superman simply because she viewed him as a potential threat to her overall plans. Worst case scenario is they fail and she just plays it off as a bunch of villains going after Superman.Although a Superman who’s seemingly evil only to be revealed as under Starro’s mind control could have been good, too.
I dunno how you’d hide that reveal when he has an alien starfish on his face, but yeah.
They could do what Batman Beyond did and have the starfish attach to his chest. Easy to handwave away as a Kryptonian physiology forced change.
It was played that way in Batman Beyond. Pretty good episodes
I wonder if someone sidled up to him and went, “Uh, Jim, you might want to check out The Boys, they kinda already went there and are still there.”
Of the many problems the DCEU has, that’s one that’s always stood out to me. It started with Superman, fine, safe bet. Then movie two is Batman….fighting Superman? And the third is the bad guys are the heroes?Are there going to be any heroes in your superhero cinematic universe? Hello?
That’s why it’s so refreshing when Wonder Woman shows up. She’s unabashedly a hero. Now, if we could only find her a decent 3rd act in a film, that would be great. Also, of course, Shazam and the whole Captains Marvel team. I’m not sure if that exists in the same universe as Batman v. Superman and The Suicide Squad, but that allowed heroes to become heroes.
The only way Superman villain is interesting is if he begins as an agent of destructive US foreign policy and comes around to…disillusionment with US foreign policy. Like the main characters. But then it becomes a Superman movie if he gets a strong arc like that. He doesn’t have to become evil for this – he just has to be the version from Dark Knight Returns.
I loved ‘Kingdom Come’ because rather than ask “What if Superman became evil?” it asked what turned out to be a much more interesting question: “What if Superman became apathetic?” The story looks at what happens to the world when a man who was the ultimate symbol of hope for a better humanity gives up on us all. The scene where Magog confronts Superman by saying, “You gave up, so they chose me. They chose the man who would kill over the man who wouldn’t” is so powerful.Man, I have to read that book again.
Well good thing that’s not what it would be. Do you even understand the core concept of suicide squad? Superman would still be superman buddy. It’s your perspective that would change, and from this comment it doesn’t seem you have much in the first place.
remember, a thousand Media Studies theses probably posit “is the question ‘what if Superman were evil’ actually ‘what if JESUS were evil’????”
think about it. Water into RedBull, healing the rich, harder for a camel to walk through the eye of a needle than for Him to enter your mother, etc
At this point it would be more transgressive to do “What if Superman was a really swell guy that everyone liked?”
Hey, Las. Is this psycho your sympathizer or your hater?
Yeah he’s a troll and hater who I reported a couple times and got obsessed with me and stalks my comments. He makes new burners every couple months to harass me and ONE PUNCH. This one he cooked up after I criticized South Park last week. Please report him if possible.
I figured as much. I’ll do what I can if I see similar accounts.
I’d like to think he remembered that evil super boy movie he produced and was like “oh that kinda sucked let’s do a giant mind controlling intergalactic starfish instead”.
Speaking of callbacks to things Gunn’s produced, “Squad” recalls “Slither” in more than a few ways, especially the denouement where the survivors have to find a path through a maze of corpses formerly in thrall of an alien parasite.
I don’t know what movie you’re talking about. What is this James Gunn produced superboy type movie?
Brightburnhttps://www.imdb.com/title/tt7752126/
I haven’t seen ‘Brightburn’ – a decision I intend to stand by – but I read the Wikipedia synopsis, and it seems like there’s no real rationale for not-Superboy to turn evil. Like, it just kind of happens? Maybe I’m missing some nuance that’s in the film, but how is it interesting to make a movie about an evil Superman if you don’t at all examine the underlying reasons for him being evil?
I guess it’s the same as every horror movie that does that (or even The Boys, and other “satire”) – “What if the thing that is usually accepted/presented as good was just like, …Bad?” It’s a very dumb take/expression of…anything, but it seems to usually sell successfully, and very often! The inciting incidents/reasons aren’t usually super compelling in other horror movies and such, after being examined for more than a second
Thats exactly it. The kid becomes evil because movie. No big inciting incident
I think the movie sorta establishes that the whole nature vs nurture argument doesn’t apply to the kid because he’s alien. He starts off seeming kinda like a ‘mild’ sociopath but then then his ship comes into play and he gets more ‘alien’ in mindset when it comes to human life. He had good parents but it didn’t matter because he’d never think the same way a human would.
In comparison, the ‘standard’ Superman is raised using the American ‘ideal’ morality by a wholesome farmer couple (with some incarnations of them having already communicated with Jor-El to make it seem like the guy didn’t just hope for the best human family to find the kid. Superman’s inhumanity more of a physical thing compared to Brightburn’s mental.
That’s not surprising, considering Rocksteady’s upcoming Suicide Squad game has Superman as the villain. Starro was the better choice, though — such a profoundly weird character, and a perfect pick for a movie that’s meant to be light-hearted and humorous.
Invincible and The Boys kind of take the wind out of the sails of any “Evil Superman” story. Though my guess is that it would be the perennial “Mind-Controlled” Superman plot, old hat enough that it could be twisted upon itself to be new (and probably how he came to Starro being the big antagonist).
Also, there’s plenty of heroes in the DCU who could take on Superman if “What if Superman Bad?” happened. Both Shazam and Martian Manhunter are just as strong as Superman and Supes is vulnerable to magic and the DCU has a pretty robust magic community including Shazam.
Both Shazam and Martian Manhunter are just as strong as SupermanYeah, but in pretty much every version of the character I’ve seen (which, admittedly, is mostly the DCAU), Martian Manhunter is taken out in the first five minutes of every fight. Fire, telepathy, loud noises, angry kitten, and he’s completely neutralized.
You left out Oreos… I mean Chocos.
“It took a $70 000 sliver of meteor to stop the one in Metropolis. With you, all I need is a penny for a book of matches.”My favourite Batman line from ‘The New Frontier’.
And yet in Snyder’s planned “Knightmare” future presumably all these people are dead and The Joker, Aquaman’s girlfriend, and Deathstroke the bad guy we never got to se be bad are still alive.
To be fair, Superman and Batman are equally vulnerable to magic.
Basically, we return to the problem of the original movie’s “What would we do if Superman tore the roof off the White House and took the president?” And the answer is, “Well, probably not send Crocodile Boy, a drunk Australian with a boomerang gimmick, a dude who’s good with guns, and a literal mental patient with a baseball bat after him, because he’ll just squash them all into jelly?”(Apparently one of the Squaddies in the new movie at least damaged Supes with a kryptonite bullet, so maybe this team would do a little better, but I wouldn’t place money on it.)
Starro the Starfish? You guys are rivaling Masters Of The Universe in on-the-nose-your-name-is-your-power names.
It’s Starro the CONQUEROR. Put some respeck on that man’s name.
“I Todded HARD, He-man, but I could not Todd them all!”
respeckMy neck!
Aren’t you really Todd-O the Toddinator though?
I’m a master of disguise. It’s actually Todd-E-Faces!
You know that save the last 75 years or so people named tailor were tailors right?
You know, if Taylor Swift married Courtney Taylor-Taylor, her name would be Taylor Taylor-Taylor.
And so damned ugly.
but then where does the surname Baker come from, I might ask.
Definitely made the right call. I don’t want another story about how Superman isn’t a hero. I miss heroic Superman.
That’s the set up for the Suicide Squad video game, right? Maybe they didn’t want to almost overlap like that, even if the takes are different universes.
This enormous starfish will devour us all! *jumps off boat *
Honestly, I’m starting to think that Lex Luthor wasn’t totally out of bounds here.
To be fair, didn’t Soviet Superman turn out OK in the end?
I’d ague Soviet Superman started off great then went full dictator.
Isn’t “Suicide Squad Vs. Superman” part of the premise of the upcoming Rocksteady video game?
It sure is:
But but but the Suicide Squad could be bad and Superman good.
Lotsa people assuming it would be another (boring) take on Evil Superman, but from what I know of James Gunn it’s just as likely it would be Good Superman, or Inconveniently Misinformed/Too-Busy-To-Do-Proper-Diligence Superman, or Superman who’s “good” but maybe not “great”. There’s a lot of room for fun choices in there that aren’t rehashing the dark stuff nobody cares about.
When I first read this headline I immediatly thought “shady government agency experiments with phantom zone projector salvaged from the wreckage from Man of Steel and accidentally unleashes an evil Superman from a parallel universe.”
Or even a Superman in the vein of Deadpool’s take on Colossus, where he’s doggedly trying to coax acts of good out of a team of scumbags because he’s so deeply genre-unsavvy. There’s something on a thematic level to the idea of exploring redemption, and positioning Waller’s cynicism and Superman’s idealism as the polar opposites that the Squad is caught between.
This guy?
Your comment gets one star and seven toggle flips.
What the hell happened to Greg Kinnear?
I don’t really understand all the comments here jumping to the conclusion that Gunn’s Superman would by necessity be a villain. He could just as easily have been a heroic antagonist trying to stop a black ops team of supervillains from unsanctioned skullduggery. There’s nothing edgelordy about that. And it’d be pretty reasonable from his POV, why he would stand in the way of the Suicide Squad.
Starro the Conqueror is a superior pick than yet another evil Superman. Even good Superman is overexposed.
I’m
so glad Gunn spared us all from Black Cloud-Starro. I love the way the
Starro spores twirled in the air before latching on to their hosts. It
was the perfect mix of goofy & horrifying.
https://mattthecatania.wordpress.com/2021/08/07/the-suicide-squad-is-to-die-for/
Really well-written and informative review.
Would superman have been a heel though? Like aren’t the Suicide Squad heels?
There’s a Suicide Squad game coming where Superman is taken over by Brainac as the baddie. But I’m so glad we got Starro instead. “I was happy, floating, looking at the stars.”
They could have used Bizarro Superman as the “Evil” Superman with a few changes. Although I always pitied Bizarro Superman. Or the could have used the Red Kryptonite trope that changes Supes into a baddie and then have him change back or someone controlling Superman with magic, like Mr. Mxyzptlk.
‘Superman, but villain’ is just Brightburn, which James Gunn also produced.And ‘Guardians of the Galaxy, but Earth’ is just The Suicide Squad.
I enjoy this guy’s movies, but I guess he doesn’t get many ideas.
I wonder if he would have made Superman a traditional villain or a “certain point of view” villain. Would it be that hard for The Wall to order the Squad to take down Superman? Maybe Superman decides to be proactive and get involved in world affairs and The Wall is ordered to take him out. To Gunn’s credit he made the right choice. Starro is scary as hell and the best Starro story was Grant Morrison’s JLA Starro story where Starro took control of The Flash.
“And if they did, they would do it like, the black cloud version of Starro.”*Looks pointedly at film version of Galactus from ‘Rise of the Silver Surfer’*
I am always happy to hear actual film makers call out such nonsense – comic books are great! That’s why you’re making movies off of them, remember? No need for muted leather colors, nuclear bombs instead of giant squids, and space clouds instead of Kirby-designed world-eaters
*Looks pointedly at film version of Parallax from ‘Green Lantern’*
Starro is a great choice. Mind controlled superman would not be a good choice.
Should’ve just gone the Batman Beyond route, and had Starro control Superman.
The “Superman As Villain” trope will most likely never be done better than it currently is with Antony Starr as Homelander, so it’s tough to see how anyone could do it better with less time to spend. I mean, sow the seeds for the Crime Syndicate if you think it’s a good down-the-road plotline to pursue, but it hardly makes sense to pit them against Superman as a one-off in a two hour film.
Or do the proper version of starro: the same size as the rest of his species just in control of Superman. Though I would like most if they left him for the Peacemaker show in place of those butterflies. PS: Hope Peacemaker swipes the rest of his dads gear in the second season, and becomes the og Peacemaker with jet superhero landings and all.