Superman Came Awfully Close To Being The Main Villain In ‘The Suicide Squad’

James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad may not be doing so well at the box office, but it’s not as though no one’s seeing it. After all, it is playing for free on a very popular streaming service, where it’s reportedly doing gangbusters. Wherever the truth lies, it’s definitely one of the renegade comic book movies, which is to say it gleefully ignores and subverts a lot of the genre’s tropes. But it almost went even farther than it did, and it was already pretty far out.

In a new interview with Script Apart (as caught by Entertainment Weekly), Gunn admitted that he almost had the posse of anti-heroes fight a different baddie in the end: Superman. He didn’t elaborate, but even though the protagonists of the Suicide Squad movies are not exactly heroes, they tend to do battle with those (arguably) worse than they are. So the Man of Steel might have gone bad. Again.

But Gunn decided to go with Starro, the giant kaiju starfish, partly because he was one of his favorite villains:

“He’s a character I love from the comics. 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.”

Besides, the time was not right to make Superman evil: Things were a little chaotic at the DCEU then (and, frankly, now). “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.

Too bad — one of the bright spots of the fairly troubled Superman III is the part where Supes goes bad, stops shaving, gets hammered at dive bars, etc. Bring that guy back.