By this point, we all know the story of James Gunn getting fired by Marvel in the summer of 2018 after angry right-wingers dug up a series of offensive tweets (that he’d already apologized for years before) and managed to create enough of a social media stir that Disney had him axed from directing Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Granted, Gunn and Marvel patched things up, and by March 2019, he was reinstated, but in that between time, Gunn had crossed the street to DC Comics where he signed on for The Suicide Squad.
What most people don’t know is how quickly Warner Bros. (DC Comics’ parent company) moved to snatch up Gunn, and according to The Suicide Squad producer Peter Safran, it was barely 72 hours after he’d been dropped by Marvel. Here’s what Safran told the Hero Nation Podcast via Comic Book:
“It came along because, truly, the Monday after James Gunn was fired by Marvel — on the Friday or the Thursday before — I ran into [Warner Bros. Pictures Group Chairman] Toby Emmerich at the Warner Bros. gym. I ran into him there and he said, ‘Hey, tell James that we love him. We love James. Whatever he wants to do, we want to do it here — whether it’s DC or otherwise, we want to work with him.’”
“And so I went to James, I talked about a couple different properties, but I really pitched him hard on The Suicide Squad because I thought that nobody puts together a disparate group of renegades and sends them on a mission better than James Gunn,” Safran said.
One of those properties was Superman, which Gunn ultimately passed on, but he didn’t land on The Suicide Squad immediately. While talking to Uproxx‘s Mike Ryan, Gunn revealed that he was trying to decide between the supervillain film and another DC project. “And I was writing those. And The Suicide Squad was just the one that began to sing,” Gunn said. As for what that other DC project was, good luck getting Gunn to tell you, because he ain’t talking.
The Suicide Squad hits theaters and HBO Max on August 6.
(Via Hero Nation Podcast)