Taste and personal preference is entirely subjective, but that hasn’t stopped debate raging on for years about the greatest comic book movie ever made. In terms of scope, scale and sheer fan service, then Avengers: Endgame and Zack Snyder’s Justice League should definitely be taken into consideration.
If we’re talking about nothing but acclaim, then Black Panther and Joker landed Best Picture nominations at the Academy Awards, while The Dark Knight and Logan definitely can’t be overlooked. One thing most people would agree on is that David Ayer’s Suicide Squad isn’t even in the same orbit as the aforementioned titles, but James Gunn’s soft reboot of the titular antiheroes could be poised to enter the conversation if it lives up to the lofty expectations set by the early reactions.
Of course, no filmmaker is going to talk up their own work as the best thing the most popular genre in cinema has ever seen before audiences have the chance to decide for themselves, but in a new interview Gunn outlined his hopes that he’s delivered the ultimate comic book blockbuster with The Suicide Squad.
“Really, I just wanted to do the ultimate all-time comic book movie, and I created The Suicide Squad based on one of my favorite books of all time by John Ostrander about a group of really crappy supervillains being used as fodder by the US government for Black Ops, putting them out on suicide visits where most of them die. This group of Suicide Squad members goes to Corto Maltese, a fictional island off the coast of Argentina, to try to stop an insurrection.”
Both of Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy efforts received widespread acclaim from critics and fans, so when you throw in the writer and director getting the chance to lean into his R-rated sensibilities and couple it with a level of creative freedom Warner Bros. is hardly famed for handing over to the DCEU’s creative personnel, then we could be in store for something special.
Obviously, Gunn is hitting the promotional trail hard with the release of The Suicide Squad just a couple of weeks away, so the hype machine is operating at maximum capacity, but based on everything we’ve seen and heard, he might not be too far off the mark.