James Gunn Says He Was Given Creative Freedom To Kill Anyone In The Suicide Squad

As you can no doubt infer from the title of the movie, not everyone is going to make it out of The Suicide Squad alive. That being said, the gang assembled for David Ayer’s original fared pretty well in terms of numbers besides a few minor casualties, though nobody was really expecting Slipknot or Diablo to survive and lead the franchise into the future.

James Gunn has already mastered the ensemble-based comic book adaptation thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Guardians of the Galaxy duology, and based on recent comments by star Joel Kinnaman, it sounds as though the filmmaker will also be returning to his R-rated roots, something that would be of huge benefit to a dirtier, grungier superhero blockbuster like The Suicide Squad.

Many fans are expecting Gunn to simply transplant the Guardians formula to the DCEU to bring similar results, but based on what we’ve seen so far, the soft reboot is shaping up to be an entirely different animal from both its predecessor and the director’s previous output. In fact, in a recent interview, the man behind Slither and Super revealed that the studio has given him complete creative freedom, and it sounds as though he’s grabbed the opportunity with both hands.

“I think you know, from pretty close to the beginning, that all of the Guardians are good apart from Nebula, who’s the outlier. But in The Suicide Squad, some of the characters end up being good, some end up being terrible. They don’t just get in fights and say they’re going to kill each other, they actually do get in fights and kill each other. You really don’t know who’s going to live and who’s going to die. I was given full freedom to kill anyone, and I mean anyone, by DC.”

The first outing for the titular team was infamously blighted by heavy-handed interference from Warner Bros. that saw two different teams assemble separate edits without David Ayer’s involvement, and they’ve clearly learned their lesson and allowed the person they hired for the job to realize their undiluted creative vision for the project. And based on his track record, Gunn could have something pretty spectacular in store for audiences when The Suicide Squad hits theaters next summer.