What Could James Gunn’s ‘Suicide Squad’ Look Like?

With James Gunn staying social media-silent following his firing at Disney, there has been less chatter than one might expect about his take on DC’s Suicide Squad.

The filmmaker will be at least writing, and possibly directing, a second Suicide Squad movie, with apparently a tenuous tie to David Ayer’s original, which was a box office hit but critically maligned and controversial among fans.

With the film still in early development and Gunn dropping no clues on social media, we got to thinking about what we might see from Suicide Squad 2 — and that it might be fun to try and divine some clues from Gunn’s past work.

…No, we aren’t going to just list off a bunch of characters and what Guardians of the Galaxy they might parallel. That could be fun, but we are sure someone has already done that on Reddit somewhere.

Some of Gunn’s staples, like having a large cast of wisecracking characters, are already baked into the premise of Suicide Squad, while some will not be so obvious. Other things that Gunn has done can be applied to the Squad, but are not inherently a part of it unless his screenplay includes it (and actually ends up getting made).

So below, here are some of the things we expect to see in Gunn’s Suicide Squad sequel. Let us know in the comments below if you disagree with any of these, or if we missed some of his storytelling tropes that might make for an interesting supervillain story.

An Angry Redneck

When you say “angry redneck,” it tends to have a negative connotation — but that is not always the case with Gunn’s writing.

While Gunn, who grew up in Missouri, features shouty white guys in his films, they run the gamut from pretty likable (Yondu) to someone you immediatley want to kill (Steve and CJ from Dawn of the Dead).

What is interesting is that in its comic form, Deadshot might have been a perfect fit for this — but given that the movies cast him as a world-weary Will Smith, that would not work as well here.

Badass women

This one is pretty obvious if you have seen Guardians of the Galaxy, but even before that you had things like giving Daphne in Scooby Doo and Sarah Polley’s Ana from Dawn of the Dead pretty action-driven parts at a time that doing so was less in fashion than it is right now.

Still, yes, let’s mention that pound for pound, Nebula and Gamora did more ass kicking in the Guardians movies than characters like Katana and Enchantress in Suicide Squad, meaning that on the off chance he does not just introduce some new characters for the next movie, theoretically Gunn has pieces already on the board that he can take better advantage of than the average writer.

A strong father/daughter plot

The entire basis for Gamora’s tortured backstory is her awful relationship with Thanos, but even before we got those flashbacks in Avengers: Infinity War, we got a pretty good taste of the complicated dynamics of that family during conversations between Thanos’s daughters in Guardians of the Galaxy 1 and 2.

While it was a pretty minor part of Dawn of the Dead, one of the most emotionally wrenching parts of the movie came from Lindy Booth’s Nicole and Matt Frewer’s Frank, a daughter and father who had to come to grips with losing one another after he was bitten by a zombie and slowly began to turn.

…And, of course, Juliet Starling from Lollipop Chainsaw is pretty hard to ignore, too.

In-Jokes and Referential Humor

One of the things that Guardians of the Galaxy did that made it speak to a nostalgia-fed audience of ’80s and ’90s kids was to make frequent references to popular culture.

More than just a string of Family Guy-esque “it’s funny because it’s a thing I recognize” jokes, Gunn used popular culture to help build characters’ personalities, realizing that people of his generation and younger have TV, music, and film as a shared communal experience in the same way our parents had major world events. That is not to say that Cheers is as important as Watergate or World War II — but it resonates just as loudly with the intended audience.

This is not something that started with Guardians (and the current wave of ’80s nostalgia) for Gunn, though; long before he was making Kevin Bacon jokes with Star-Lord, Gunn wrote a Scooby-Doo movie in which the Mystery, Inc. gang found Scrappy every bit as irritating and unbearable as audiences did in the ’80s, giving him motivation to turn evil.

Found family

One of the most common storytelling elements of modern-day fiction (and particularly prevalent on superhero TV) is the idea of “found family,” where the friends you make along the way are at least as much your “real” family as your biological family is.

Gunn is ahead of the curve on this — not only was it a really overt theme in Guardians of the Galaxy, but various other projects he has written and/or directed have at least played with the idea. It was a big part of the dynamic among the Scooby Gang, and the relationship that Ana and Michael had in Dawn of the Dead was very much like they were the mom and dad trying to keep a dysfunctional family road trip on track.

Bathos

A staple of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the concept of bathos is actually a time-tested storytelling technique that predates the current generation of filmmakers by quite a bit.

And, yes, of all the Marvel filmmakers, it is probably Gunn who uses it the most (and usually, the most effectively).

Bathos is, essentially, cutting the tension with a joke. Juxtaposing a serious idea with something absurd can create bathos, which when misused can undercut the importance of the serious idea. The word comes from a critical essay from the 1700s in which Alexander Pope cited it as a bad habit that damaged poetry. 

This was also a frequent criticism of Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2.

Bathos can be evoked intentionally, though, and that is mostly what Marvel and Gunn have done with it. In the same way it can sometimes undermine the serious element of the scene, the juxtaposition can also enhance the humor, making it an effective storytelling tool for stories with intentionally comic elements.

Familiar faces

Like Zack Snyder, Gunn seems to pick up new friends along the way each time he makes a new movie. 

In a lot of cases, those friends stick around for quite a while.

Popular examples are Smallville‘s Michael Rosenbaum and Firefly‘s Nathan Fillion, who appear in most of Gunn’s movies. Same with The Walking Dead‘s Michael Rooker, Black Lightning‘s Gregg Henry, and Gunn’s brother Sean.

It would not be at all unlikely to see at least most of these people showing up in Suicide Squad 2 in some capacity if Gunn turns out to be the director as well as the writer. And if that is indeed the current plan, the screenplay may reflect it with roles written to the strengths of those particular actors (such as what Gunn did with Guardians of the Galaxy‘s Yondu for Rooker).

The fact that he has evoked so much loyalty from his Guardians cast could mean some of them — at least the ones not contractually barred from doing so by Marvel/Disney — might come along for the ride, too, but we will see.

Redemption

In the time since Gunn was fired from the Guardians of the Galaxy films, its cast and critics have talked about the role that redemption plays in the franchise — this group of lost souls found purpose in one another and turned around lives that were defined by loss and violence to pursue virtue and heroism.

That is nothing new to Gunn’s work, though; before the Guardians did that, Michael from Dawn of the Dead was trying to make amends for being a generally crappy husband and father, and being unable to save his family. 

“Heroic Comedic Sociopath”

This one comes courtesy of TV Tropes — becuase if you do this kind of story and you don’t at least check TV Tropes to make sure you aren’t missing something, you’re doing it wrong.

Gunn’s Super has a classic example of the “heroic comedic sociopath” trope — which is an area into which you can see plenty of Suicide Squad characters slipping.

Here’s how they describe it: “Frank D’Arbo, the protagonist of Super, has a case of hyper-morality after being told by God himself to bring justice to the streets of his neighborhood. Inspired by comics, he assumes the superhero alter ego Crimson Bolt and uses a wrench to smash the faces of not only criminals, but people who push in queues, all For Great Justice. His sidekick, the self-named Boltie, is another, even more extreme version of this.”

If this sounds like a jokey take on The Punisher (or even just a fairly straightforward take on Deadpool), you’re on target. It would not be difficult to see a D’Arbo-style character written into the Suicide Squad as a villain who always thought he was doing the right thing, but got put away by a more straight-arrow superhero who knew better. Certainly one could see a version of Gunn’s take on Ronan the Accuser falling into line with that characterization.

Hell, even Groot’s and Yondu’s brutal slaughter of their opponents at various points in the Guardians movies could be this if you wanted to get technical about it.