With a name like The Suicide Squad, it would be foolish to expect every member of the cast to survive until the end credits, as we discovered for ourselves in the first movie when Adam Beach’s Slipknot met an early demise. That being said, the overwhelming majority of the titular team were still present and accounted for by the time David Ayer’s antihero ensemble was over, although many of them won’t be returning for the second go-round.
James Gunn’s follow-up finds itself in the strange position of being both a sequel and a reboot of sorts at the same time, with Warner Bros. surely keen to avoid the kind of behind-the-scenes issues that ultimately left 2016’s Suicide Squad as a victim of heavy-handed studio interference. Hiring the man behind Guardians of the Galaxy to take the helm was an inspired move, with Gunn already definitively proving that he can handle a comic book movie based around a group of misfits and outsiders.
The Suicide Squad isn’t due to hit theaters until August 2021, meaning it could be a while yet before we hear any official plot details, or even who half of the cast are playing for that matter. Nonetheless, we’ve now learned that the team are going to suffer heavy losses throughout the course of the movie.
According to our sources – the same ones who told us a Green Lantern show is coming to HBO Max and that John Cena is playing Vin Diesel’s brother in Fast & Furious 9 – the most recent version of the script features very few of the team surviving until the end of the movie. Reportedly, Harley Quinn, Amanda Waller, King Shark, Ratcatcher, Idris Elba’s still-unconfirmed character and maybe one or two more will make it out of The Suicide Squad, but the rest are toast.
That means John Cena, arguably the highest-profile new addition to the cast outside of Elba, is going to be killed off at some point. Surely nobody was expecting all of the bit-part players to make it, but given the sheer size of the ensemble cast that James Gunn has assembled, it appears that The Suicide Squad should definitely be expected to take heavy losses against whatever threat they end up coming up against.