The first Suicide Squad film wasn’t exactly a fan-favorite, but it was able to bring a ton of money at the box office with $700M+ in total. With money like that, how could you not greenlight a sequel and try to duplicate that success?. While we did eventually get a sequel with James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, there was a very different sequel in development early on.
Before Gunn was brought onto the project, director Gavin O’Connor was originally going to be picking up the reigns from David Ayer, as he moved onto a Gotham City Sirens film, which has still yet to make any movement. After a long silence, the director recently went onto the Playlist podcast where he opened up about his sequel that never was.
What happened there was I wrote a deal to write a script, and they knew what I was writing. At that level, with those kinds of movies, with that budget, no one’s just going off and writing something without walking them through what the movie’s gonna be, and everyone was cool with it.
Gavin O’Connor
O’Connor also went into how the project ended up scrapped and how a managerial shake-up affected his film. He even goes on to highlight the direction he was taking with his project.
What happened was during the latter part of writing the script there was a whole regime change at DC, and when that happened, they wanted it to be a comedy. And I’m like, ‘i’m not writing a comedy.‘ I mean, It [was] fun, but it’s not a yuk-fest. And the new regime wanted a different movie than I was writing.
Gavin O’Connor
While it would’ve been neat to see what he had in store for viewers, audiences and critics alike seemed pretty satisfied with Gunn‘s vision. It seems that the comedic direction did help win some viewers over. It’ll be interesting to see if a third installment finds its way into the franchise, or DC moves on to exploring the stories from the individual members, as Peacemaker gets his own HBO Max series.
Source: The Playlist
