Who Is The Villain In Suicide Squad?

When your "heroes" are a team of villains, it's hard to imagine just who they might fight and not lose the sympathy of the audience.

That's an issue more comic book movies are going to be facing in the near future, as both the Suicide Squad and the Sinister Six have feature film adaptations headed for the big screen (plus the long-rumored, often-cancelled Venom movie).

With the cast of Suicide Squad now official and the lineup of its antiheroes in the books, we thought it might be fun to speculate who might be a good candidate for them to face off with in 2016...!

Lex Luthor

The film has been repeatedly described as Ocean's Eleven with supervillains, and if it's a caper movie, there needs to be somebody on the receiving end of the caper.

Lex is obvious for a couple of reasons: since Man of Steel was somewhat influenced by the John Byrne era of Superman storytelling, it seems likely Lex will be some variation on the "Evil Businessman Lex" archetype.

Giving them somebody to rob/sabotage who is a nasty enough bugger in his own right to make it easy to root for the Squad is why a movie like Ocean's Eleven works to begin with, giving us a smug, self-important antgonist whose criminal enterprise is just a, not the, reason we want to see him taken down a peg.

Given that description, there are few characters more perfectly suited to it than Lex.

And, yes -- not only with Lex Luthor appear in the upcoming Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, but some of the earliest rumors about Suicide Squad had actor Jesse Eisenberg reprising the role in this film.

Checkmate or S.H.A.D.E.

This would be a twofer, in that it could introduce some new characters to add value and depth to the fledgling DC movie universe, while providing a great foil for the Squad.

While there's no guarantee the Suicide Squad will be run by A.R.G.U.S. in the movie, that seems likely since A.R.G.U.S. has become the DC spy agency of choice both in the comics and on Arrow and The Flash. That there are other spy organizations in the DC Universe who operate seemingly with impunity and often at cross purposes to A.R.G.U.S. seems like a great opportunity for conflict...especially in a movie like Suicide Squad, where there is value to having no concrete "good guys" and "bad guys," per se.

Characters like Peacekeeper, Mr. Terrific, Fire, Iron Munro and Maxwell Lord are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of characters with ties to Checkmate, while S.H.A.D.E. has Father Time, Frankenstein, Amethyst, Ray Palmer and on and on.

Hell, can you imagine the bloodbath that could ensue if A.R.G.U.S. sent the Suicide Squad to face off with S.H.A.D.E. and the Creature Commandos? That'd be fun to watch.

Black Adam

This one seems like a long shot, but when you've got a bad guy who runs his own country, and a team like the Squad, who have been used in black ops missions including destabilizing foreign governments before, there's certainly opportunity for overlap.

Brother Eye/O.M.A.C.

Could we see a version of the Infinite Crisis-era Brother Eye story, wherein longtime Justice League liaison Maxwell Lord went bad and, as the head of Checkmate, raised an O.M.A.C. army to hunt the world's superheroes?

It doesn't seem totally implausible, and the idea of metahumans in custody who aren't on the O.M.A.C.'s radar for one reason or another, having to work together to overtake a force that vastly overpowers them, is certainly a compelling one. This could also speak to the internal DC Universe politics mentioned above.