“I used to think that my life was a tragedy. But now I realize, it’s a fucking comedy.” – Arthur Fleck/Joker (played by Joaquin Phoenix) “I cherish peace with all my heart. I don't care how many men, women, and children I need to kill to get it.” – Christopher Smith/Peacemaker (played by John Cena) Today, my summer blog series on the evolution of comic book movies comes to an end. I’ve examined the origins of the genre with Richard Donner’s Superman and Tim Burton’s Batman and looked at how this genre’s come to dominate cinema before and after the Marvel Cinematic Universe (not to mention the impact of the MCU itself). Thus, what better way to end this series than by looking ahead to try and predict where this genre is going for the next ten years…and beyond? And what better way to do that than look back on four comic book movies that (in my humble opinion) foreshadow trends within the genre in unique yet equally interesting ways? Before we get started, I have decided to not write about James Mangold’s Logan here because I wrote about it so extensively in another blog. So, click here for my full thoughts on Logan both as a western and as a groundbreaking comic book movie. So, without further ado…LET’S GET STARTED!! [NOTE: This blog contains spoilers for several movies. You have been warned.] Black Panther (2018) By the early 1990s, Wesley Snipes (Blade, Dolemite Is My Name) began working to get a film about the Marvel Comics superhero Black Panther made out of his desire to offer an artistic counter to how he felt Hollywood typically portrayed Africa in cinema. By 1994, Snipes entered talks with Columbia Pictures to star in the project and was in talks with writer-directors like John Singleton (Boyz n the Hood) about the movie. However, by the early 2000s, issues with the drafted screenplays and at Marvel’s corporate level stalled the project in the midst of Snipes starring in the Blade trilogy for the company. In 2005, producer and at-the-time Marvel CEO Avi Arad (X-Men, Spider-Man 2) restated the company’s intentions to adapt Black Panther to the silver screen under the newly-formed Marvel Studios. This intention was reiterated two years later by Marvel Studios producer Kevin Feige, but Snipes’s involvement was on hold due to him serving a three-year sentence for tax evasion. In 2011, documentarian Mark Bailey (Ethel, Last Days in Vietnam) was hired by Feige to write a screenplay for the project. With the Marvel Cinematic Universe in full swing by this point, seeds were being planted related to the world of Black Panther and Wakanda (i.e. the introduction of vibranium in 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger). In October of 2014, Feige officially announced the feature film Black Panther set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Chadwick Boseman (42, Get on Up, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) cast in the lead role of T’Challa that would first appear in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War. Several directors, including Ava DuVernay (Selma, 13th) and F. Gary Gray (Friday, Straight Outta Compton), were in talks with Feige about directing the movie. Discussions with another emerging filmmaker, Ryan Cooler (Fruitvale Station), had stalled but picked up once again after the successful opening of his 2015 sports drama Creed. In January of 2016, Coogler was officially hired to direct Black Panther. Part of Coogler agreeing to join the project was Feige allowing him to bring on some of the crew from Fruitvale Station and Creed in order to differentiate the look and feel of Black Panther from other Marvel Studios movies. Specifically, he hired cinematographer Rachel Morrison (Dope, Mudbound), production designer Hannah Beachler (Moonlight, No Sudden Move), and composer Ludwig Göransson (Creed II, The Mandalorian, Tenet) for the film. In addition to directing, Coogler also co-wrote the screenplay with Joe Robert Cole (The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story). Coogler and Cole were heavily inspired by Jack Kirby’s Christopher Priest’s, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ comic runs on the character, among others. Specifically, Coogler wanted to feature Kraven the Hunter as a main antagonist for the film but could not due to Sony holding the film rights to the character. While Coogler ensured with Cole that the story of the film remain independent from anything else in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Feige ensured fans that the story and the location of Wakanda would be cemented as “a very important” link to Avengers: Infinity War and its sequel, Avengers: Endgame. Furthermore, Coogler wanted to integrate the Wakanda language (first introduced in Civil War), which was heavily inspired by the Xhosa language of southern Africa, into the screenplay as much as possible. He particularly wanted characters to utilize it organically, but often. By July of 2016, much of the supporting cast for the film was officially announced. This included Lupita Nyong’o (12 Years a Slave, The Jungle Book, Us) as T’Challa’s lover Nakia, Michael B. Jordan (Fruitvale Station, Creed, Just Mercy) as the main villain Erik Killmonger, and Danai Gurira (The Walking Dead) as Wakandan general Okoye. Later announcements that year were Winston Duke (Us) as renegade chieftain M’Baku, Forest Whitaker (Good Morning, Vietnam, Bird, The Last King of Scotland) as King T’Chaka’s trusted advisor Zuri, Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out, Judas and the Black Messiah) as T’Challa’s best friend W’Kabi, Angela Bassett (Boyz n the Hood, Malcolm X, Soul) as T’Challa’s mother Ramonda, and Letitia Wright (Ready Player One, Death on the Nile) as T’Challa’s little sister Shuri. In designing the look of Wakanda, Coogler was inspired by the African nation of Lesotho due to its geography enabling it to mostly resist European colonization. In doing so, he aimed to ground the environments of the film in reality and overhaul some of the more alien-looking looks of Wakandan technologies found in Kirby’s comic book aesthetic. Furthermore, Beachler looked to the pre-colonization architecture of the Mali Empire in West Africa as well as the aesthetic of other nations (i.e. Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia) in order for the sets of the film to serve as a love letter to the African continent. Regarding the clothing for the characters in the movie, costume designer Ruth E. Carter (Malcolm X, Amistad, Dolemite Is My Name) looked to the wardrobe of several African tribes (i.e. Maasai, Basotho, Zhosa, Zulu) to inspire the film’s costumes. Specifically, she aimed to avoid objectifying the women of the Dora Milaje by fully armoring them in red which reflected many African cultures while also being practical outfits for battle. The hair department, supervised by Camille Friend, sought to encourage the actors to keep their natural hair by utilizing braids and twists while only using extensions or wigs when necessary. Principal photography lasted from January to April of 2017. Mostly shooting both in the studio and on location in Atlanta, Georgia, with the crew moving to various parts of Busan, South Korea for the car chase scene in the first act as well as Uganda, South Africa, and Zambia for aerial footage and capturing scenic environments. During post-production, several visual effects studios (primarily Industrial Light & Magic, or ILM) were involved in enhancing the urban environments of Wakanda with the mission of sticking to Coogler’s vision for including and preserving authentic aspects of African culture. Released in February of 2018, Black Panther became the second-highest-grossing film of 2018 by earning more than 1.3 billion dollars on a 200-million-dollar budget (it is currently the thirteenth-highest-grossing film of all time). Critically, the film was almost universally praised for its direction, screenplay, costume and production design, music, and the performances of Boseman, Jordan, and Wright. It earned the first Best Picture nomination for a comic book flick, and Marvel Studios’s first Oscar wins for costume design, score, and production design. Culturally, critics and film historians recognized the significance of the film as an achievement in non-stereotypical representation for the African and African-American communities due to its majority-black cast and making Africa and African culture the focus of a major Hollywood blockbuster. Having written about Black Panther twice, once on its own terms and another time within the broader context of the MCU, I’d rather focus here on the film’s cultural significance within the comic book genre. So, if you’re interested on my criticisms of the movie in and of itself, I recommend clicking either of those links. Despite my mixed feelings about it, I cannot deny how important Black Panther is for the superhero genre. Without question, it aimed to elevate blockbuster filmmaking in the modern age with some relevant and potent social commentary about the history of abuses towards black and brown people. I imagine that’s part of the reason why the film (particularly Jordan’s character of Erik Killmonger) resonated so much with so many people. That being said, the movie does a decent enough job injecting its political messages without forgetting what makes these kinds of movies entertaining. By having some solid action scenes (I always enjoyed the casino fight and car chase in Busan, South Korea), Black Panther retains the fun-spirited nature of comic book movies for much of its runtime. While I don’t believe that it always does so well, I acknowledge that there’s enough action-adventure beats to make the film a fun ride most of the time. Arguably, however, the film’s legacy will not lie with its story, characters, or themes, but with its cultural resonance and impact on Hollywood as a whole. Peoples’ thoughts about the credibility and relevance of the Academy Awards may vary, but (in my humble opinion) Black Panther cemented its name in modern cinematic history by becoming the first superhero flick nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. Simply put, the fact that this kind of a movie can be viewed in the eyes of industry figures and critics as a great movie worthy of awards-season recognition shows just how much this genre of cinema has become mainstream with both cinephiles and general moviegoers alike (it also proves that The Dark Knight was robbed, but I digress 😊). Needless to say, this movie has hopefully paved the way for future comic book movies that are just as, if not more, deserving of such Oscar recognition to receive it. All that being said, Black Panther is undeniably an important watershed moment for positive representation of African and African-American culture in film (preceding how Shang-Chi did this for Asian representation and Ms. Marvel for Muslim representation). As a white person, I cannot personally speak to the importance of this. Yet, I will not argue against the fact that seeing black superhero role models like T’Challa, Okoye, and Shuri on the big screen gives hope to black and brown kids around the world that they can achieve their dreams and make a difference in the world. Regardless of my opinions about the film as a work of art, the cast and crew of Black Panther deserve the praise they received on this level alone. And, hopefully, its sequel coming out this November will have a similar cultural significance in addition to being a great comic book movie. Image by eduardo merino from Pixabay Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) Considered a less-than-ideal way of this kind of news breaking, the public learned of Sony Pictures’ intentions to develop an animated comedy Spider-Man-focused movie with writer-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (21 Jump Street, The LEGO Movie) following Sony’s computers being hacked in 2014 and e-mails about the project being leaked. Producer Amy Pascal (Spider-Man: Homecoming, Venom) approached Lord and Miller about the project, who agreed on the condition that they were allowed to adapt Marvel Comics writer Dan Slott’s 2014 “Spider-Verse” storyline with Miles Morales as the protagonist. The project was officially announced in the spring of 2015, with Lord Miller attached to produce as well as write a story treatment, as a standalone story from previous and concurrent live-action Spider-Man flicks. Initially intended to be solely directed by writer and animator Bob Persichetti (Shrek 2, Puss in Boots), both Peter Ramsey (Batman Forever, Rise of the Guardians) and Rodney Rothman (22 Jump Street) signed on to co-direct the project by the end of 2017. In writing the screenplay with Rothman, Lord knew that a good reason was needed for this particular Spider-Man project (ultimately deciding that it was telling Morales’s story becoming the famous web-crawler that made this project unique). Once figuring that out, Lord and Rothman were consulted by Morales’s co-creator Brian Michael Bendis. In the original versions of the script, a romance between Morales and Spider-Gwen was included but scrapped. However, the character of Spider-Gwen was kept as a prominent supporting player thanks to the efforts of producer Christina Steinberg. Finally, in brainstorming a post-credits scene, Lord and Rothman initially aimed to feature a union of all three live-action Spider-Man actors but Sony advised against it in order to avoid confusing the audience. By April of 2017, Shameik Moore (Dope) was cast to voice Miles Morales while Live Schreiber (Scream, Goon, Spotlight) would voice Kingpin as the film’s antagonist. By June of 2018, Morales’s father Jefferson Davis and uncle Aaron Davis were cast with Brian Tyree Henry (If Beale Street Could Talk, Eternals) and Mahershala Ali (Moonlight, Green Book) playing the roles, respectively. Also, Jake Johnson (21 Jump Street, Jurassic World) was announced as the voice of Morales’s mentor, Peter B. Parker/Spider-Man, and Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit, The Edge of Seventeen, Bumblebee) was revealed to be voicing Spider-Gwen. In choosing which alternate Spider-Man characters would be in the movie, Lord and Miller aimed to find characters from Marvel Comics lines who “were as diverse as possible.” In overseeing the animation design, Lord and Miller wanted the audience to feel like they had “walked inside a comic book” in order to use animation to tell a Spider-Man story in a way that live action was unable to. After nearly one year of work by two animators, ten seconds of footage was signed off on by Lord and Miller which became the basis for creating the visual language of the movie. In order to hit the film’s late-2018 release date, the initial crew of one animator grew to over 170 by the summer of 2018 (the largest animation team in Sony’s production history). By having artists working on top of rendered CGI frames in 2D, the creative team for the film aimed to make every frame “look like a comic panel” with some inspiration from Japanese anime (particularly the works of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli). Released in December of 2018, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse grossed over 375 million dollars on a 90-million-dollar budget and earned rave reviews from critics who praised the film’s animation style, characterization, story, voice acting, and humor. Many people, including actors from other comic book media, praised the movie and deemed it a game-changer for the medium of both animation and the superhero movie genre. It became the first Sony Animation film to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, and is to date only one of five non-Disney or Pixar animated films to win the award. For my more extensive thoughts on Into the Spider-Verse in and of itself, click here. Instead, I want to focus my thoughts here on what this movie did for the comic book movie genre both at the time and going forward. As I’ve said before, I don’t love Into the Spider-Verse in the way that many comic book movie fans do. However, similar to Black Panther, I greatly respect what it has done both for the genre and for moviemaking in general. I think that sometimes people forget how this movie pulled off a multiverse story months before the release of Avengers: Endgame (let alone years prior to Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness). In fact, I’d contend that general audiences may not have bought into the epic time-travel story of those aforementioned Marvel movies as much as they did without the success of Into the Spider-Verse. On its own terms, however, the movie excels as an innovative piece of visual storytelling. The work that Sony put into designing its signature style and flair made an incalculable impact on how filmmakers can faithfully adapt the look of comic books and graphic novels for the silvers screen. While the frenetic nature of Into the Spider-Verse can be (in my humble opinion) overwhelming at times, it’s undeniably the most forward-thinking aspect of the film. But the part of the movie that I’ve found to be generally underappreciated is its subtle celebration of diversity. Without ever drawing attention to Miles Morales’s Puerto Rican heritage, audiences can pick up on those hints without being taken out of the story. Furthermore, the fact that two of the Spider-People (Gwen Stacy and Peni Parker) are women does not come off as a cynical example of forced inclusion, but rather serves the filmmakers’ thematic lens of telling a story about how people with different backgrounds can come together to help others not in spite of what makes them unique, but because of it. Without question, that’s the most beautiful thing about Into the Spider-Verse. And combined with its prescient multiverse story and hyper-creative animation style, it’s no wonder that the movie remains culturally relevant nearly four years after it first came out (and with two sequels on the way!). Joker (2019) During the early 2010s, Joaquin Phoenix (Gladiator, Walk the Line, Her) was looking for a low-budget “character study” project centered on a comic book villain. He was more interested in a one-off experience compared to offers from Marvel Studios to sign a multi-picture project to play Doctor Strange or another comic book hero. Around the same time, Todd Phillips (Old School, The Hangover) turned down multiple offers to direct superhero movies because he lacked interest in the genre. However, he was intrigued by creating a more grounded comic book movie, and was specifically attracted to telling the origins of DC’s Joker because the lack of a definitive backstory gave him more creative freedom than other characters. Following the premiere of his black comedy crime film War Dogs, Phillips pitched his idea for a standalone Joker origin story to Warner Brothers. Despite being known for his comedy movies, Phillips was driven to do something more “irreverent” and proposed to the studio that they differentiate themselves from Marvel Studios by producing low-budget, one-off films. They were particularly swayed by this prospect after the critical and commercial success of Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman, and decided to de-emphasize the DC Extended Universe by revealing plans for a Joker film with Phillips directing and co-writing the screenplay with Scott Silver (8 Mile, The Fighter), while Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, The Wolf of Wall Street) agreed to produce. In writing the screenplay, Phillips and Silver struggled to have some of the subject matter be approved by Warner Brothers. Furthermore, they sought not to make the film overtly political despite its themes being relevant to modern society. Instead, Phillips had childhood trauma and mental illness in mind when writing the script. Drawing inspiration from several of Scorsese’s movies, notably Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, Phillips looked to several character studies of the 1970s as well from Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to Sidney Lumet’s Serpico. In terms of looking to comics, the premise for the movie came from the 1988 graphic novel “Batman: The Killing Joke” while the climactic talk show scene was inspired by a scene from the 1986 graphic novel “The Dark Knight Returns.” Yet Phillips insisted that he aimed to not tell the story of Joker, but rather “the story of becoming Joker” and thus “picked and chose” what they liked from a variety of comic books featuring the character. Phillips looked not just to fiction for inspiration, but also living conditions in New York City in the 1980s. A specific instance that inspired the movie’s subway shooting scene was Bernhard Goetz’s shooting four men on a New York City subway in 1984. But in bringing another interpretation of Joker to the silver screen, Phillips aimed to retain the ambiguous nature of the character’s past by having him be a delusional and unreliable narrator (and thus giving the audience total freedom to interpret the film as they prefer). Despite the studio pressuring Phillips to cast Leonardo DiCaprio (Titanic, The Aviator, The Revenant) in the lead role, he insisted on casting Phoenix to play Joker. However, despite the story initially exciting Phoenix he hesitated to accept the offer due to his concern that the character could become a “simplified, reductive archetype” and thus cause the audience to feel distant from him. In the wake of the disappointing performance of 2017’s Justice League, Walter Hamada took over as head of DC Films at Warner Brothers and sifted through the movies currently in development to decide which projects should move forward. Unsure of the prospects of the Joker movie, Hamada shrunk its budget to fifty-five million dollars in an effort to dissuade Phillips. However, by July of 2018 Phoenix had made a deal to star in the movie after four months of back-and-forth negotiations with Phillips. As soon as Phoenix signed on, Hamada greenlit the film and set it for an October 2019 release date. Principal photography began in New York City in September of 2018, and moved to Jersey City and Newark by October before shifting back to the city by mid-November. Zazie Beetz (Deadpool 2, The Harder They Fall), who accepted a supporting role in the movie, described how Phillips would rewrite scenes the night before and she and Phoenix would rehearse them in the make-up trailer before shooting the scene that day. Furthermore, according to Phillips, Phoenix was known to sometimes walk off-set while filming out of a need to compose himself (which confused some of the actors because they felt that they messed up). However, Phoenix apparently never walked off set while shooting with Robert de Niro (The King of Comedy, Goodfellas, The Irishman) who commented that what Phoenix was doing was “very intense.” In designing the look of Gotham for the film, Newark was specifically chosen due to the presence of poverty which Phillips wanted to be apparent in Arthur Fleck’s surroundings. To prepare for the role of Fleck, Phoenix lost 52 pounds so as to appear “malnourished,” studied videos of people diagnosed with pathological laughter, and read books about political assassins in order to grasp the motivations of killers. After premiering at the Venice Film Festival in August, Joker debuted in theaters on October 4, 2019. On a budget of approximately 62 million dollars, the film grossed over one billion dollars worldwide becoming the highest-grossing R-rated film and the third-highest-grossing DC film of all time (surpassing Deadpool 2 and The Dark Knight, respectively). While critics were generally towards the film’s direction, visuals, score, and cinematography (with universal praise going towards Phoenix’s performance), they were more divided over its portrayal of mental illness and violence. Still, the movie received a leading eleven nominations at that year’s Oscars (including for Best Picture and Best Director) and won Best Actor for Phoenix and Best Original Score for Icelandic musician Hildur Guðnadóttir. Joker is a divisive comic book movie, and understandably so. Coming from Todd Phillips, a generally-liked comedy director, it’s a film that takes so much of what fans of superhero flicks have come to expect and turns those expectations on their head in pursuit of crafting a gritty story about insanity, violence, and closing society off to those deemed “undesirable.” In other words, it’s one of those movies that’s not really enjoyable to watch yet works in spite of that. Yes, I’m someone who really likes Joker. Apparently, to some, this is a controversial opinion. Honestly, though, I’ve seen the film twice and struggle to be convinced by many peoples’ major criticisms of it. However, that’s probably a topic for another time. Because even if you don’t like Joker, it’s a movie that (in my humble opinion) will heavily influence how some filmmakers approach taking the comic book movie genre in a new direction going forward. First of all, Joker laughs in the face of those who describe other superhero movies such as The Dark Knight as “grounded.” It’s clear that Phillips’s intentions in making the movie was to capture a villain’s origin story on a plane of realism that most comic book films can only dream of (if they even try at all). In that regard, Joker is not a movie about the Joker—at least the comic book villain that Jack Nicholson, Mark Hamill, Heath Ledger and (unfortunately) Jared Leto have portrayed. Rather, Joaquin Phoenix crafts a deeply troubled, lonely, and psychologically fragile man—Arthur Fleck—whose transformative break from reality puts him on the path to becoming the infamous archenemy of the “Caped Crusader” of Gotham. By doing so, Joker transcends its comic book roots in the ideas it explores and its visual and aesthetic homage to the hyper-realistic crime films of the 1970s and 1980s. Whether or not that makes for a good movie is a matter of taste, but it certainly makes for a pretty unique approach within this genre of cinema that only films like Logan or The Dark Knight even come close to. Aside from Phoenix’s one-for-the-ages performance, I think the best part of Joker from a cinematic perspective is how well it uses the various elements of filmmaking to explore its themes and establish a distinctively dark tone and gritty atmosphere. The score, composed by Hildur Guðnadóttir, stands out as one of the more haunting uses of music (particularly during the bathroom scene) that I’ve seen in a drama in the last ten years. In addition, the Oscar-nominated cinematography of Lawrence Sher utilizes some incredibly inspired shot choices (the meaningfully awkward close-ups on Phoenix’s face, to be specific) to make the film exclusively from Fleck’s tragically distorted point of view. Simply put, these elements of moviemaking combine to create a tour de force of a character study that encapsulates so much of the anxieties of modern society which turn Fleck into a psychopathic killer. Again, you don’t have to agree with me that the film does this well. But, I think it’s safe to say that Joker has several artistic merits that alone make the movie worth watching. Furthermore, it cemented in the minds of Hollywood the reality that audiences want darker and grittier superhero stories (in the same way that Logan did). Regardless of your opinions of Joker, it’s difficult to deny the conversation that the film started and the fact that it’s commercial success proves how much the comic book movie genre is here to stay because it can branch out in such a different direction than Marvel Studios are doing. Image by Vinson Tan ( 楊 祖 武 ) from Pixabay The Suicide Squad (2021)
Despite the negative critical response to David Ayer’s Suicide Squad that came out in 2016, Warner Brothers deemed it enough of a commercial success to warrant fast-tracking development on a sequel. As Ayer was intent on directing an all-female team-up film centered on Harley Quinn, the studio began the search for a director to the Suicide Squad sequel by early 2017 and considered figures such as Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland, Venom, Uncharted), Jonathan Levine (Warm Bodies, Long Shot), and Mel Gibson (Braveheart, Hacksaw Ridge). By July of 2018, Catalonia native Jaume Collet-Serra (The Commuter, Jungle Cruise) was the new favorite to direct the sequel. However, after accepting Jungle Cruise and preferring to do an origin story (in the form of the upcoming Dwayne Johnson-led Black Adam), he left the project. A month later, Gavin O’Connor (Miracle, Warrior) was chosen to direct and co-write the film, but left by October to make The Way Back with Ben Affleck while also being frustrated that Warner Brothers was moving ahead with Cathy Yan’s spin-off film, Birds of Prey, that had a story remarkably similar to his script. By this point, Will Smith, Margot Robbie, and Jared Leto were expected to reprise their roles of Deadshot, Harley Quinn, and Joker, respectively, despite the fact that the movie still lacked a director and shooting script. Around that same time, however, a miracle fell into Warner Brothers’s hands in the form of James Gunn (Slither, Guardians of the Galaxy). In October that year, after being fired by Disney from directing Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Gunn closed a deal to write and possibly direct a sequel to Suicide Squad. After initially expressing hesitancy due to the studio’s insistence that he direct a Superman movie, Gunn became more interested in working with DC when Warner Brothers gave him creative license to adapt any DC property that he wanted to. After choosing to make a movie about the Suicide Squad, Gunn was given near-complete creative control over the project (their main hope was that he would include Robbie’s version of Harley Quinn in the story). But the day after Gunn was officially hired to direct the film, Disney reinstated him as director of Vol. 3 and Gunn spoke with Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel Studios, who agreed to delay production on Vol. 3 for Gunn in return for Gunn agreeing to “make a great movie” in the Suicide Squad sequel. By January 2019, the film received its official title and release date (The Suicide Squad was Gunn’s joke title, but Warner Brothers liked it and agreed to it). Based on a three-page treatment, Gunn wrote several drafts of the screenplay which the studio very much liked. Gunn aimed to make the movie “its own thing,” as opposed to a direct sequel or full-on reboot, by not referencing the events of Suicide Squad or Birds of Prey while also not outright contradicting or retconning them. Aiming to make an R-rated superhero comedy (despite Warner Brothers insisting that it be PG-13), Gunn took inspiration from John Ostrander’s original “Suicide Squad” comic book run in the 1980s as well as 1960s war movies like The Great Escape and The Dirty Dozen. In choosing his team roster, Gunn spent days sifting through the library of DC Comics characters in order a formulate a team that would work well together while also ensuring that each of them felt like they were pulled out of different genres. Furthermore, he wanted his team to feel different from the characters in his two Guardians of the Galaxy films by making the audience uncertain of who would end up being bad or good. Several characters, from Deathstroke to Mr. Freeze, were rejected. Notably, he decided not to include the Joker because he felt that Amanda Waller would have no need to use him as part of the Suicide Squad. Regarding the story itself, Gunn wanted to take risks by making a film that “didn’t play by the rules.” To do this, he incorporated sequences from certain characters’ explicit points of view, an isolated subplot where Harley Quinn is separated from the rest of the action, and title cards to segue between scenes. When it came to the film’s primary antagonist, Gunn put the blame squarely on the shoulders of Waller and the U.S. government given the real-world history of American interventionism in underdeveloped nations. Initially interested in making Superman the big-bad that the Suicide Squad team goes to fight, Gunn ultimately chose to feature Starro the Conqueror as a character that he found both ridiculous and terrifying, but also he figured it was the only major DC Comics villain very unlikely that the character would be adapted by another filmmaker in the future. Furthermore, in deciding what characters to kill off, the studio gave Gunn permission to kill any character. However, Gunn did not want to give in to the temptation to not kill off any of the major characters in the end. Thus, he decided that Pola-Dot Man would be the best choice given his arc was the most complete by that point in the story. When it came to casting his Suicide Squad team, Gunn defend Ayer’s casting choices in spite of the overall negative reception of 2016’s Suicide Squad. First and foremost, Gunn wrote in Robbie’s Harley Quinn and Viola Davis’s version of Amanda Waller while Smith was revealed by February of 2019 to no longer be involved. In place of Smith’s version of Deadshot, Gunn met with Idris Elba to play a different character which Elba felt “honored” to be considered for the movie. Not long after, both Joel Kinnaman and Jai Courtney were preparing to reprise their roles of Rick Flag and Captain Boomerang, respectively, from Ayer’s Suicide Squad. Unlike Elba being cast as Bloodsport (Gunn was initially unsure which character Elba would play), Gunn wrote the King Shark character with Sylvester Stallone in mind. After Dave Bautista was busy filming Army of the Dead with Zack Snyder, Gunn oversaw negotiations for John Cena to play the role of Peacemaker after Gunn saw Cena’s performance in Judd Apatow’s comedy film Trainwreck. In April, David Dastmalchian and Daniela Melchior were cast as Polka-Dot Man and Ratcatcher, respectively, while Michael Rooker was in negotiations to play Savant in May. By September, the full cast was finalized and included Peter Capaldi as the Thinker, Pete Davidson as Blackguard, Flula Borg as Javelin, Nathan Fillion as T.D.K., Alice Braga as Sol Soria, and Sean Gunn performing motion capture for Weasel. Principal photography began in late September of 2019 at Pinewood Studios in Atlanta, Georgia, and lasted for about three months before moving to Colón, Panama for a month to shoot scenes on the streets of Corto Maltese. Gunn utilized many practical effects (especially compared to other comic book movies), such as for the scene of King Shark ripping a person in half. Filming wrapped in late February of 2020 in Porto, Portugal. According to Gunn, Warner Brothers never interfered with his creative process except for a few minor notes. Furthermore, he claimed that The Suicide Squad was the most fun that he had making a film due to being able to prioritize creativity over perfectionism, being in a good place mentally and emotionally, having a “stupendous” cast, crew, and producers, and feeling at the height of his directing talents. Released on August 5, 2021, The Suicide Squad was positively received by many critics due to Gunn’s direction and screenplay, and people generally agreed that it was a significant improvement over Ayer’s movie. However, the film was a box-office disappointment as it grossed less than 170 million dollars on a 185-million-dollar budget. Analysts surmised that the movie’s poor financial performance was due to anxieties about the COVD-19 pandemic, the movie being simultaneously released to stream on HBO Max, and some confusion among general audiences about whether the film was a sequel to or a reboot of its 2016 predecessor. In spite of its poor box-office performance, I think that James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad has immense potential to impact the future of comic book movies more than we may think right now. First off, it improves upon the success of the Deadpool films by turning away from relying almost exclusively on meta humor and out-of-left-field pop culture references. Instead, Gunn’s writing (combined with the performances of the cast) makes this movie undoubtedly one of the funniest comic book films ever made (the only other major contenders being Gunn’s own Guardians of the Galaxy films and Taika Waititi’s Thor movies). But why is it funnier? Well, if you ask me, The Suicide Squad does what a movie like Deadpool does but better. Essentially, Gunn made a “soft parody” the superhero movies by subverting most of audiences’ expectations about what this kind of movie is. Whereas other comic book flicks spend two hours trying to invest you in the main hero’s journey and character growth, Gunn makes it clear from the get-go that you’re not supposed to empathize with most of these characters. Also, while other comic book movies use team-up scenarios for the payoff of seeing them work together, Gunn makes their teamwork the most chaotic and anti-climatic part of the movie (albeit in the best way). Essentially, The Suicide Squad is a great example of showing a different path that filmmakers can take within the superhero genre without being hyper-experimental so as to turn off general moviegoers. Undoubtedly, it’s one of the best things that DC Films has offered in the last decade (I’d throw the spin-off show, Peacemaker, into that conversation as well). Did it make a ton of money compared to other comic book movies? No, but I don’t think it needed to in order to leave its mark on the genre in the way that it did. Simply put, if DC and Warner Brothers can offer comic book fans creative visions as starkly different (but equally interesting) as Gunn’s The Suicide Squad and Matt Reeves’s The Batman, then I wouldn’t count them out yet as being a solid alternative producer of blockbuster superhero entertainment. Certainly, there are other superhero movies that you could argue serve as predictors for where the genre is going. Whether it’s Zack Snyder’s four-hour director’s cut of Justice League, Matt Reeves’s crime epic The Batman, or Taika Waititi’s zany romantic comedy Thor: Love and Thunder, there is clearly still plenty of room for filmmakers of all different sensibilities and styles to innovate within the comic book genre and leave their mark on it for viewers of all ages and backgrounds to enjoy these kinds of blockbuster movies. And with so many superhero movies announced from Marvel, Sony, and Warner Brothers like The Marvels, Blade, The Flash, and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, we won’t have to wait long to see what comes next for superhero fans. Which of these comic book movies do you think best foreshadows where the genre is going for the next decade? What are some other recent superhero flicks that you think people should check out? What opinions of mine do you find absolutely ridiculous? Let me know in the comments below. Until next time, this has been… Yours Truly, Amateur Analyst
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Austin McManusI have no academic or professional background in film production or criticism; I simply love watching and talking about movies. Archives
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