James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad almost had the team facing off against a mind-controlled Superman

We’ve ranted a fair bit about how much we love James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad but it seems that it could have even been cooler, had his original idea went ahead for the movie.

The movie does a great job, as did David Ayer’s first Suicide Squad movie, of opening up the DCEU and pulling in some of the more obscure and outlandish characters but it seems that it could have touched more on the core DCEU than the finished movie does.

In a new interview with a German magazine Filmstarts, Gunn reveals that he toyed with the idea of having Task Force X go up against the Man of Steel himself, Superman.

“When I started writing The Suicide Squad, one idea was that they would fight Superman,” Gunn said.

“The Suicide Squad has to catch Superman for some reason. That was all just a vague idea. He’s [Superman] gotten out of hand or is being controlled by someone. And then this group of lousy super-villains has to face the most powerful hero in the world.”

The idea of Superman being under mind-control isn’t that out of the question as we’ve seen it happen several times in the comics over the years at the hands of various enemies and devices, including Poison Ivy in Hush. Also, we may have seen Starro be part of that story, had it happened, as he is capable of mind-controlling people.

And fans of Zack Snyder’s Justice League will know that in that storyline eventually we would have seen Superman under the control of Darkseid. Anyway, just thinking out loud…

Gunn went on: “I like this idea and if DC does this sequel, then please not without me.”

Could this be one of the many projects he’s reportedly developing with Warners/DC (here)? It’s also worth pointing out that we reported a loooooooong time ago that the plot for Gunn’s sequel (it’s a sequel, deal with it) almost featured the team going up against Dwayne Johnson’s Black Adam (here), so the idea of them fighting a massively powerful enemy may have been in Gunn’s plot for a while.

Interestingly, he was,in a different interview, asked about a Justice League Vs Suicide Squad movie and he expressed his love for the idea but seemed to confirm that, at the minute, no-one knows who the DCEU’s Superman is; when asked if he’d like to do the movie, he replied: “I don’t know. I would have to think about it. I haven’t put any thought into a Suicide Squad vs Justice League movie. But it’s not a bad idea, you know?

“But I think I’ve got to figure out who the Justice League is first, because I have no clue. I’m in the middle here of DC, everybody’s always asking me, ‘Is Henry Cavill still Superman?’ I don’t know who Superman is! Who knows?” 

It’s curious because the idea of the Squad going up against Superman and/or the Justice League is the plot of the upcoming Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League game (here), so it’s unlikely Warners would have wanted the movie to be going that direction… but that’s not to say we may not see it happen down the line.