Jai Courtney is hopeful his DC role could come back around. The Dangerous Animals actor first played George “Digger” Harkness, better known as the bank-robbing Flash rogue Captain Boomerang, in director David Ayer’s Suicide Squad in 2016 opposite the likes of Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, Will Smith’s Deadshot, and Joel Kinnaman’s Col. Rick Flag. Courtney then reprised the role in the James Gunn-directed The Suicide Squad in 2021, but unlike his first go ’round, Boomerang didn’t survive Gunn’s take on the team of expendable supervillains.
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Courtney’s Captain Boomerang was among Task Force X’s first wave to wade ashore on the beaches of Corto Maltese in the film’s explosive opening sequence, where most of the team — including Boomer, Savant (Michael Rooker), Blackguard (Pete Davidson), Javelin (Flula Borg), Mongal (Mayling Ng), and T.D.K./The Detachable Kid (Nathan Fillion) — were killed off in spectacularly bloody fashion.
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But in a new interview, Courtney reveals that The Suicide Squad writer-director told him there’s nothing stopping Boomerang from coming back.
“I was like, ‘Come on, man. Boomerang is cool,’” Courtney told Variety, recalling his talk with Gunn after learning of his fate in The Suicide Squad. “And James is like, ‘You know these rules don’t really apply. Just because he dies here doesn’t mean it’s gone forever, right?’ And I was like, ‘Hell yeah.’”
“So I have hope,” Courtney added of a return to the DC Universe. “Somewhere in the back of my mind, there’s a prayer that we’ll see more of Boomerang one day.”
Gunn has since become head of the new DC Studios with The Suicide Squad producer Peter Safran, with the duo describing the animated Creature Commandos as an “aperitif” to the new canon officially launching with Gunn’s Superman movie in July. “Nothing is canon until Creature Commandos next year – a sort of aperitif to the DCU – and then a deeper dive into the universe with Superman,” Gunn stated last year. “Some actors will be playing characters they’ve played in other stories and some plot points might be consistent with plot points from the dozens of films, shows and animated projects that have come from DC in the past. But nothing is canon until [Creature Commandos] and [Superman].”
The upcoming second season of the HBO Max series Peacemaker — which spun out of The Suicide Squad movie — is an amalgamation of the old DC Extended Universe and the new DC Universe canon, as suggested by the trailer revealing the Justice Gang’s Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced) and Green Lantern Guy Gardner (Fillion) from the Superman movie. As for how Captain Boomerang might come back despite being killed off in The Suicide Squad, Gunn described that movie as being “light canon” to the DCU.
“There are references to things that happened in the past, and those references then become canon in the DCU because we mention them,” Gunn noted at New York Comic Con in October when explaining how the new DCU timeline works. That means that the mission to Corto Maltese happened because it’s referenced in Creature Commandos, but not necessarily how it happened as seen in The Suicide Squad.
The new DCU — so far consisting of Creature Commandos, Superman, and Peacemaker season 2 — officially takes flight when Superman soars into theaters on July 11 as the first film from DC Studios.
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