Superman vs The Suicide Squad: Why James Gunn Cut the Man of Steel

The Suicide Squad Updates: The Suicide Squad starring Margot Robbie, Viola Davis, Idris Elba, Sylvester Stallone, Joel Kinnaman, David Dastmalchian, John Cena, Peter Capaldi, and Daniela Melchior will be streaming on HBO Max by September 6 and is currently playing in theaters.
Superman was in talks to be the bad guy for The Suicide Squad against Task Force X but instead, he chose an extraterrestrial enemy: Starro the Conqueror but why?
Well according to James Guns, he did think of taking Superman as a villain but what made him change the idea was the uncertainty around Henry Cavill’s Superman. With all the questions like, “In DCEU, who is Superman?”, “Will this movie takes place outside of the DCEU?”
Warner Bros. offered many times to revamp Superman for Gunn’s R-rated movie and have Viola Davis (Amber Wallar) siccing the Task Force X for Superman but he last appeared in Justice League’s two versions.
He didn’t want to deal with all the whys so he made Starro the Conqueror, a starfish-like alien as a villain over Superman. There was a time when James Gunn wanted Superman to fight against Suicide Squad, he said in an interview with Script Apart.
In an interview with Filmstars, James Gunn did reveal his idea to have a Superman vs Suicide Squad with there being a motive to stop Superman as it may be that someone is controlling him or the matter has just gotten out of hands and that’s where our expendable supervillains could have come and fought against the most powerful superhero in the world while they are a group of lousy supervillains, had it not been for the issues around Superman. But Superman’s place in the DC Universe connected with the Extended Universe and the uncertainties around the character which made him choose Starro.

What James Gunn Shared About The Suicide Squad?

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James Gunn has always loved the character of Starro since the character was first seen in the team’s superhero debut appearance in The Brave and the Bold as the first enemy which united the Justice League.
Gunn in an interview with Script Apart said, he thinks that Starro is scary in his own way, what he does, and absolutely ludicrous which makes him the perfect comic book character. He also confessed that Starro used to scare the crap out of him as a child with the face-huggers on Superman and Batman.
According to him, Starro would have probably not gotten his own movie or be in another movie even though he was one of the major DC villains. And even if he was, a black cloud version of Starro would have been used instead of the humongous starfish-like Kaiju which is a ridiculously big, cerulean blue and bright pink bad guy.