The marketing for The Suicide Squad hinted that many of the film’s villainous heroes would meet their doom. No one was safe.
Now that the movie is out, writer and director James Gunn is talking about the death toll. It ends up that some people were safe, but a lot of them weren’t.
From the start, Gunn was honest with Warner Bros. about his plan to kill off a substantial number of characters. The devil was in the details. In an interview with Variety, Gunn notes that he’d had the bloody opening sequence of the movie — which featured name actors like Pete Davidson (Blackguard), Nathan Fillion (TDK) and Michael Rooker (Savant) — planned from the start and that it was always a cover for the real story yet to come.
James Gunn had big plans for The Suicide Squad from the start
Gunn said he laid out his plans “from the beginning when I pitched it to the Warner Bros. guys. They don’t know who Blackguard is, right? So I brought in all these pictures from the comics. I laid them down, and I told them the story in the same way. So they all thought that was the Suicide Squad as well. They thought that was gonna be the whole movie and then they got to see them all killed. So they had the same experience.”
In reality, the characters Gunn killed off in the opening sequence were just pawns for the second Suicide Squad team. Those characters — including Bloodsport (Idris Elba), Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior), King Shark (Sylvester Stallone), Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian) and Peacemaker (John Cena) — were the real focus of the movie the whole time.
He also talked about the decision to swap out Polka-Dot Man and Ratcatcher 2 after deciding that he didn’t want to see Ratcatcher 2 die. “The original ending that I pitched, one main character died and one main character did not die. And the main character who died was Ratcatcher 2. She was so sweet, I just felt like it was just too dark. Not that we don’t love Polka-Dot Man. We do. I just couldn’t . So I relented.”
In other words, no one was really safe in The Suicide Squad and Gunn could have killed anyone off, save for two characters: Harley Quinn and Bloodsport. Gun confirmed that he never wrote anything that had those two characters dying. “No, that never happened,” he said.
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h/t SyFy Wire