James Gunn says he got "carte blanche" to kill whoever he wants in The Suicide Squad

In the comics, one of the great gimmicks of the Suicide Squad books (especially early on) was that characters died all the time. Before Harley Quinn came along and became the star of every Suicide Squad comic, waiting to see who would die was basically the whole thing. David Ayer’s movie paid lip service to that with boring nobody Slipknot blowing up after deciding to see if the whole “we put a bomb in your neck so you’d follow the rules” thing was legitimate and Diablo let himself get blown up, but—possibly because that movie isn’t very good—those didn’t feel like particularly impactful deaths.

For his The Suicide Squad sequel/reboot thing, though, director James Gunn is teasing a proper series of big-name characters getting taken out. On Twitter, he recently noted that DC Comics gave him “carte blanche” to do what he wanted with the movie, saying one of the things he wanted the company to agree to before he signed on was that “no character was protected by DC.”