After watching James Gunn’s “The Suicide Squad,” you really can’t imagine the team fighting any other villain than Starro. The giant, colorful, frankly ridiculous alien starfish fits perfectly with the tone set forth through the first two acts of Gunn’s superhero film. But early in the planning stages of “The Suicide Squad,” the filmmaker had another villain in mind for the misfit heroes to take on—Superman.
Yes, you read that right. According to an interview with the Script Apart podcast, James Gunn explained that he thought that perhaps his Squad should take on the world’s greatest hero, Superman. Though, after more consideration, he decided the big starfish was the right way to go.
Gunn explained that “there was a time when I thought The Suicide Squad should fight Superman.” However, even though that sounds like a neat idea, considering Superman can be seen as a puppet for the government and a do-gooder that doesn’t like people that play outside the confines of his black and white morality, the filmmaker became bogged down with continuity questions that turned him off of the idea.
“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,” Gunn said.
So, that leads to the inevitable question—why Starro? Well, according to Gunn, he loved the character and would rather do it justice than wait for someone else to ruin the big, colorful starfish.
“He’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.”
And that is why James Gunn makes great superhero films that fans love. He gets it. “The Suicide Squad” is in theaters and on HBO Max now.