The Chaotic Successes and Failures of the Suicide Squad

We have seen the Suicide Squad in movies, TV shows, video games, and anime. The reception to each property has been as chaotic as Harley Quinn. Is the Suicide Squad exploding in popularity, or will it self-destruct like Slipknot?

Comics

The Suicide Squad, or Task Force X, debuted in DC’s Silver Age during The Brave and the Bold. Initially, Task Force X was a military squad led by Rick Flag, battling otherworldly creatures for the government. John Ostrander reimagined the team in the Legends miniseries and their own popular spinoff series.

Flag is forced to herd incarcerated supervillains into fighting for the government by iron-fisted Amanda Waller. To incentivize these supervillains, success in their dangerous missions will reduce their sentences. However, failure or escape will detonate the explosives implanted in their necks.

Much of the appeal of Ostrander’s comic series came from its edgy nonconformity. Imagine a team of B-list villains finally given their due. Now imagine these characters being forced to do the heroes’ dirty work before being killed unceremoniously.

Task Force X Members

The team’s field leader is Rick Flag, Jr., a no-nonsense war hero who led the original Suicide Squadron during World War II and is Waller’s most trusted agent.

Flag’s ragtag crew of over fifty includes June Moone, an innocent woman possessed by the evil entity named the Enchantress. Deadshot (Floyd Lawton) is an impeccable marksman with a death wish. Captain Boomerang (George Harkness) is a boomerang-throwing Aussie bank robber.

Suicide Squad (2016)

Development on the first Suicide Squad movie began in 2009, only securing writer-director David Ayer in 2014. The movie was smooth sailing until the months leading up to its 2016 release, when Warner Bros. (WB) demanded lighthearted reshoots. WB executives commissioned an edit of the movie that butchered the original third act of Ayer’s cut.

The film was ultimately a commercial success but received a mixed critical response. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus cites the film’s “muddled plot, thinly written characters, and choppy directing” as caveats to its talent and humor. Critics such as Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers and Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson argue that the film should have been a hardcore action than a “PG-13 crowdpleaser.”

Ayer later admitted in a Tweet that he accepts the criticisms of his movie, but he also stated that if he had a time machine, he would “make Joker the main villain and engineer a more grounded story.” In that Tweet, he cited the insanity of the comics as his source of inspiration and hated the studio meddling that resulted in a “vanilla” movie.

Ayer recently restarted the #ReleaseTheAyerCut craze that started around the same time as the “Snyder Cut” buzz. According to Ayer, the theatrical cut ruined the flow of his studio cut.

Team One

Ayer’s roster is part Ostrander, part characters later introduced in the New 52 and Rebirth continuities.

The film introduces the Joker’s psychiatrist-turned-psychotic-lover, the series mascot Harley Quinn. Katana (Tatsu Yamashiro) is a samurai warrior avenging her husband, whose soul is infused in her blade. Killer Croc (Waylon Jones) is a wrestler with a skin condition that gives him scaly skin and super strength. El Diablo (Chato Santana) is a remorseful man who accidentally unleashes his pyrokinetic powers on his family.

The Suicide Squad (2021)

WB, seeing the profit that Ayer’s Suicide Squad generated, immediately slated Ayer to return with a sequel. Ayer, perhaps regretting an old shame, opted to work on Gotham City Sirens instead. Gavin O’Connor left the project angrily after seeing how similar Birds of Prey was to his script. Mel Gibson was courted as a director before a golden opportunity presented itself years later.

James Gunn was fired from Marvel after his old controversial Tweets resurfaced. WB saw his career suicide as a career in saving the Suicide Squad. WB was desperate to make this movie profitable, so they allowed Gunn complete creative control. He could take or leave any elements of the first film, kill off any DC character, raise the rating to R, have the most giant sets in WB’s history, and add “the” to the title as a joke.

He described the film as “its own thing,” which could redirect the franchise with more obscure characters rather than being a direct sequel to Ayer’s film. The film would neither address nor retcon the events of Suicide Squad or Birds of Prey.

Marvel reinstated Gunn as a director the day after DC hired him. Marvel’s president, Kevin Feige, learning of Gunn’s conflict of interest with DC, encouraged him to “make a great movie.” Feige delayed Guardians of the Galaxy 3 until Gunn finished work on The Suicide Squad. Considering the everlasting heated rivalry between Marvel and DC fans, this was an amusingly cordial moment between the president of the MCU and the future co-president of the DCEU.

The Suicide Squad premiered simultaneously in theatres and Max. Its free availability on a streaming platform impeded its box office performance.

Despite its financial disappointment, critics universally appreciated the film’s miraculous rebounding of the Suicide Squad franchise, as evidenced by its 90% Rotten Tomatoes score. Gunn’s unique visual style, which matches gore with goofiness, was a highlight to critics who enjoyed the movie and a blight to those who didn’t share that sentiment.

Team Two

Ostrander’s ’80s series team inspired Gunn because they were “a bunch of losers, B-grade supervillains.” He chose his roster to comedically feel like B-list characters who are each from a completely different movie. Surprisingly, his influences included war films like The Dirty Dozen.

Only a few characters return from Ayer’s team. A few characters of the fake-out “Team One” are obscure members of Ostrander’s comics. However, most of “Team Two” are DC characters who have never been on this team.

The film introduces Bloodsport (Robert DuBois), a mercenary who failed to assassinate Superman with a Kryptonite bullet. King Shark (Nanaue) is a hybrid human and shark god. Ratcatcher (Cleo Cazo), the daughter and successor to a man who can control rats. Polka-Dot Man (Abner Krill) is an eccentrically tragic character whose polka-dot costume can be weaponized.

The standout in this lineup is Peacemaker (Christopher Smith). Peacemaker is a contradictory vigilante who believes in achieving peace at any cost, including brutal violence. Gunn realized John Cena’s dramatic potential from this role, which led to the successful spinoff show Peacemaker.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (2024)

Where do you even begin with the dumpster fire that is Kill the Justice League? Its core issues were its excessive delays, bad press, and live service model, though that’s hardly scratching the surface.

Saying that Kill the Justice League was in ‘development hell’ would be an understatement. WB announced a Suicide Squad game in 2010, teasing its existence in the post-credits scenes of Arkham Origins, though the game would take 14 years to release.

Unimpressed with their Montreal game division’s attempt on the game, WB passed it over to Rocksteady Studios. Rocksteady had a rock-steady reputation for producing the acclaimed Batman: Arkham game series, but this would be their first complex online game.

Internal reports differed on the causes for the game’s many delays. Reasons ranged from rewrites, high employee turnover, a scrapped vehicle system, sexual harassment allegations, and leaked gameplay trailers. On top of these issues, the founders of Rocksteady left the company in 2022, two years before the game’s launch. What’s apparent is that Rocksteady had an unsteady development.

During 2023’s State of Play, fans received the worst news that the game would be a ‘live service,’ meaning that it would be online-only and feature all the pickings of modern AAA games. On top of this backlash, Rocksteady announced another delay to 2024.

Despite all the delays, the game shut down its servers on its first day of early access due to a bug that caused players to complete the story immediately. Weeks after its launch, the game still had a grindy gameplay loop, messy UI, poor technical performance, and connectivity issues.

Fans were upset with a story where they were forced to kill instead of play as the heroes. The cherry on top was this game being marketed as the final performance of Batman’s late, legendary voice actor, Kevin Conroy.

As YouTuber Matt McMuscles argues in his ‘What Happened?’ series documenting the internal issues leading to disastrous games, “It’s another thing when the fully-priced game you paid for that’s not working is also constantly trying to incentivize you to spend your money.”

WB vocally expressed disappointment with the game’s commercial and critical failure. However, WB’s significant investment in the project likely made them refuse to allow the game to be canceled when the writing was on the wall, and they may be allowing Rocksteady to take the fall in their stead.

Suicide Squad Isekai (2024)

Once again, WB secured some big names, this time Wit Studios, who created the successful Batman Ninja anime. Wit Studios, in turn, proposed the idea of a Suicide Squad anime to Tappei Nagatsuki, author of the popular isekai Re: ZERO.

“Isekai,” meaning “another world,” is a trendy anime genre where people are whisked from an ordinary world into a fantasy world. However, compared to the “ordinary” world, the visually stunning Gotham City, the isekai world the team is whisked to is painfully generic.

Suicide Squad Isekai spends too much time in jail cells or royal courts, prattling on uninspired plans and politics. Scamboli Reviews, an anime reviewer, poked fun at inconsistent character models and reused background characters. The anime finds its footing in its latter half’s bombastic action but never becomes memorable.

In an interview with ComicBook, producer Shinya Tsuruoka stated, “As the story is original, we had to balance the unique aspects of Japanese anime with the established characteristics of the original characters. There were elements of character traits and settings that both sides were unwilling to compromise on.” In other words, some issues arose from creating an original anime story with pre-existing characters.

Conclusion

The Suicide Squad franchise is one of the shakiest in recent memory. Beginning with successful fringe comics that turned B-listers into A-listers, the series exploded three decades later.

The first movie was a commercial success and a critical failure, while the sequel was the exact opposite. A successful TV show, disastrous video game, and middling anime concurrently exist within this same fringe franchise.

I am skeptical about WB’s executive decision-making. WB tends to throw money at big names for short-term profitability over long-term critical success. WB’s desperation to have James Gunn on board proves this point.

However, with Gunn at the helm, the DCU finally has a strong vision for its properties. Creators have creative control and seemingly minimal studio interference. The Suicide Squad are in good hands and won’t ‘go boom’ anytime soon.