“Why Do You Hate Birds?” James Gunn Answers Fans Asking About Bird Deaths in The Suicide Squad

Audiences and critics can’t stop raven about The Suicide Squad, but director James Gunn is quacking down on accusations that he “hates birds” because of fowl actions committed by the movie’s many villains. Spoiler warning for The Suicide Squad. Gunn’s R-rated and ultra-gory DC movie with a high kill count opens with Belle Reve inmate Savant (Michael Rooker) using his expert marksmanship to kill a bird with a rubber ball, but it’s Corto Maltese dictator Mateo Suárez (Joaquín Cosío) who racks up the biggest bird body count when he orders his men to burn a birdcage filled with Silvio Luna’s (Juan Diego Botto) prized pets.

“I love birds, but I can’t help if there are some real pieces-of-shit in #TheSuicideSquad,” Gunn tweeted in response to a Twitter user who asked if the director doesn’t like birds. “I honestly love birds.”

“There are pages of this question. For the record, a lot more people die than birds,” Gunn added in a subsequent tweet with an image showing a flock of fans asking variations of the same question: “Why do you hate birds?”

Gunn previously revealed studio Warner Bros. permitted him to kill anyone he wants in The Suicide Squad, where Task Force X director Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) recruits a new squad of expendable supervillains for another suicide mission.

“They said I could keep [all the characters from David Ayer’s Suicide Squad] or do away with them all,” Gunn said in a recent interview. “I could do a completely new squad – which I considered – and they said, ‘You can kill anyone.’ Warner was pretty much on board [with the story] from the beginning – it was pretty much firmly in place from the inception of me taking on the project.”

The Guardians of the Galaxy filmmaker added the DC Films studio was “trusting of me throughout the entire process, almost to the degree to which I was frightened, because it really is all me, 100 percent – there’s no one to blame if something goes wrong, except for myself!”

American Humane monitored the animal action and no animals were harmed during the making of The Suicide Squad.

Starring Margot Robbie, Idris Elba, John Cena, Joel Kinnaman, Jai Courtney, Peter Capaldi, David Dastmalchian, Daniela Melchior, Sylvester Stallone, and Viola Davis, The Suicide Squad is now playing in theaters and streaming on HBO Max through September 6.