James Gunn Considered Making Superman the Villain of The Suicide Squad

While it obviously didn’t end up happening, for a brief period of time James Gunn considered making Superman the big bad of The Suicide Squad. Gunn appeared on the Script Apart podcast (per EW) and revealed that at one point when he was working on the plot, he thought of making the Man of Steel Task Force X’s enemy.

“There was a time when I thought The Suicide Squad should fight Superman,” Gunn said, before stating that it was only a brief thought before he settled on Starro, who is one of his favorites.

“[Starro]’s a character I love from the comics,” he said. “I think he’s a perfect comic book character because he’s absolutely ludicrous but also very scary in his own way. What he does is scary. He used to scare the crap out of me when I was a child, putting those facehuggers on Superman and Batman. So I thought he was one of the major, major DC villains that was probably never going to be put into another movie. And if they did, it’d have been a ‘black cloud’ version of Starro. Not a giant walking starfish, a kaiju that’s bright pink and cerulean blue, this ridiculously big, bright bad guy.”

Superman is referenced in the film, as Idris Elba’s Bloodsport is said to have been confined to Belle Reve because he put Superman in the hospital with a Kryptonite bullet. Beyond that though, the character is persona non grata in the film.

Gunn also noted that he pivoted quickly away from Superman because when he was writing it, there were a lot of questions about where the DCEU was. He noted, “At the time, there were a lot of questions like, ‘Who is Superman in the DCEU? Is this movie outside the DCEU?’, and I just didn’t want to deal with it all that much.”

The film is currently in theaters and available on HBO Max for the rest of the month.