Huh… so when talking about how The Suicide Squad failed at the Box Office, it’s now referred to as Suicide Squad 2? Weird.

So, remember those days when we were told over and over again that, although several actors were returning from David Ayer’s Suicide Squad movie, James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad was NOT a sequel to that movie?

Despite the fact that, as I say, there’s a lot of familiar faces in the cast and there’s an acknowledgment of previous events in the movie itself, we were assured over and over again it was a soft reboot, a fresh start, a standalone adventure?

Well, guess what, Forbes just went with this headline: ‘Suicide Squad 2’ creates a new $100 million losers club.

In this article, it is pondered upon how the movie, despite the rave reviews (we loved it), opened to very poor numbers, in fact, it opened to almost $100m less than David Ayer’s (unfairly) maligned original movie (hence the headline).

And yes, we know that it’s streaming and there’s still that damned Pandemic, but Fast 9 and this week’s Free Guy proved that movie fans still want to go and see movies in the cinema.

So, what happened?

Well, we don’t doubt those two aforementioned issues played a part for sure but we must not ignore the fact that many fans of DC are also fans of Zack Snyder’s movies (Man of Steel, Batman V Superman and Justice League) and they must not be underestimated… they just this year finally managed to get Snyder’s Justice League released and, while HBO Max/Warners still won’t let us know how well it did for them financially, we do know it gathered them 60% of new subscribers.

We know that fans have called and called for the release of David Ayer’s vastly different original cut of Suicide Squad which, we’re told, is literally sitting, finished, on a shelf, ready to be released, yet HBO Max/Warners refuse to do so.

Why?

Well, we don’t know.

But we do know that word is a lot of Snyder/DC fans boycotted The Suicide Squad because of Warners’ apparent efforts to ignore, nae destroy, the world set up by Zack Snyder. Henry Cavill is still in limbo and we don’t know if he’ll ever return as Superman despite two Superman projects currently in development starring different actors. We know that while Ben Affleck is returning for Next year’s The Flash as Batman so too is Micheal Keaton and word is, it’s Keaton’s Batman, not Affleck’s, that will endure after the movie.

It’s a really odd situation. Warners are hellbent, it seems, to destroy the foundations that they build starting with Man of Steel and don’t listen to the guff online, none of those movies were financial failures.

Warners have got themselves in a place where, in an effort to destroy Zack Snyder’s DC universe, they have managed to create a situation where they have annoyed the fans to the point where they aren’t going to see what are genuinely good movies as has happened with The Suicide Squad.

And then, the icing on the cake? Now the movie is being referred to as Suicide Squad 2. It’s hard to imagine this is an accident and not an attempt to oddly place the blame for the movie’s failure at the feet of Ayer and co… as if this is a legacy carried on from the worlds created by Snyder and Ayer.

Which, I suppose, in a way it may well be… just not in the way this headline wants you to think.

Well played DC/Warners… you may have put yourselves in checkmate only that means no-one will be the winner in this sad situation.

Source: Forbes