News just broke a short while ago that James Gunn is on board to write the upcoming Suicide Squad 2 movie for DC. He might also direct, as well. Given that he was fired from directing a prominent superhero movie just a few months ago, this may seem like a huge surprise. In some ways, it isn't.
A long, long time ago, when James Gunn was still a Marvel darling with a successful set of characters under his belt, James Gunn actually talked about doing a non-Guardians project. At the time, he wanted to do Marvel's sort-of version of Suicide Squad, a Thunderbolts movie, and he was told by Kevin Feige,
James, if Guardians does well you'll be able to do whatever you want so we'll see what happens.
Well, then DC opted to put together a Suicide Squad movie, which is also a movie about a group of villains who end up doing heroic work when the heroes are unable to. This sort of negated the need for a Thunderbolts movie to need to be in the marketplace, although when has that ever stopped a movie studio before? (Just look at Mowgli and The Jungle Book getting announced at similar times, etc. etc.)
Once Suicide Squad was announced, it kind of took the wind out of James Gunn's Thunderbolts sails. However, James Gunn was seemingly excited about the prospect of DC's Suicide Squad project, noting:
DC is doing Suicide Squad, so I'm not so sure Thunderbolts are applicable anymore, sadly. But [I'm] looking forward to Suicide Squad.
Next, an alt-right blogger looked way back into James Gunn's Twitter into tweets that were from nearly a decade ago to find out that James Gunn made a slew of inappropriate jokes. The House of Mouse, also meaning Marvel, promptly fired him, leading us to today when news broke that James Gunn is still in demand for big box office fodder. We don't know if he'll direct the movie, given Gavin O'Connor was previously attached. However, even having James Gunn on board as a writer could be a big win for the DC universe.
Therefore, James Gunn is free to write and direct for whatever movie with whatever studio he wants to next. Given we know he can helm a superhero movie and given we know this type of project was exactly something he was excited about, signing the writer and director on for Suicide Squad 2 actually is less surprising than it might initially seem.
If Marvel doesn't want James Gunn, Warner Bros. and DC seemingly have no qualms about hiring on a talented writer to help expand its somewhat beleaguered universe. The new Suicide Squad sequel is expected to be a totally different take on the franchise than the first movie, which was directed by David Ayer.
Next, James Gunn has a secretive horror film BrightBurn set up at Sony. The movie was expected to be out in 2019, but was recently pushed back to 2019. The movie hasn't had a big push since news broke about Gunn's old tweets earlier this year.
Regardless, we'll let you know as soon as we know more and you can see all of what is headed to theaters in 2019 with our full release schedule.
