James Gunn certainly had a lot of experience that one would expect would serve him well while making The Suicide Squad. By the time he filmed the DC team-up movie he had written and directed a pair of superhero team-up films for Marvel in the Guardians of the Galaxy films. These movies also brought together a collection of unique characters to go on larger than life adventures. They included a lot of characters that non-comic book fans probably wouldn't know. They even both included characters that were created almost entirely from CGI. However, it turns out this last piece of experience didn't really help James Gunn as much as you might think.
While the Guardians of the Galaxy included Rocket and Groot, a pair of CGI characters, the director says that the experience there didn't really translate to creating King Shark for The Suicide Squad. Part of the problem was that, at the end of the day, giving a raccoon a humanoid look is easier than doing the same thing with a shark, but that's not where the problems end. According to Gunn...
He was actually harder than both Rocket and Groot to develop. Rocket was hard because it’s difficult taking an animal and turning it into a humanoid shape, but it’s five times more difficult to do that with a shark – it was a very, very painstaking process. And from a character standpoint he’s very different from those guys, because at the end of the day, with the Guardians, we know they’re good. That isn’t true of the Suicide Squad. King Shark is a fish and he eats human beings. He doesn’t have such a mammalian love for people. But he wants to belong and he wants to show that he’s smart. And he’s not.
As simple as it is to see once James Gunn says it to Total Film (via GamnesRadar) Rocket is at least a mammal. He's got more in common with a human than you would think, but that means giving him human-like characteristics isn't necessarily that tough. You just take a racoon and make it bipedal and you're most of the way there.
Sharks, however, are not mammals. They don't have arms or legs, so in the case of King Shark you have to figure out how to take a creature that doesn't have all the requisite pieces and figure out how to give them to him and still make the whole thing look believable enough that audiences can still suspend disbelief. You can check out more of King Shark and his Task Force X teammates in the latest trailer for The Suicide Squad down below:
On the plus side, from the trailers alone it looks like The Suicide Squad solved the King Shark problem. He's already one of the favorite characters among fans and we haven't seven seen the finished movie yet. Making him sympathetic to people, despite the fact that he eats people, doesn't appear to be a problem.
