And for a day, it seemed like everything was gone. Later he called me - he himself was in shock - and told me what the powers that be had decided. I was like, “You don’t know?” I was surprised. I called Kevin the morning it was going on, and I said, “Is this a big deal?” And he goes, “I don’t know.” That was a moment. How did you first learn that you had been fired from Marvel? These are edited excerpts from that conversation. Gunn discussed his firing and rehiring by Marvel, the making of “The Suicide Squad” for DC and his perspective on the two superhero franchises. I feel as if I was communicating my whole being.” Speaking of “The Suicide Squad,” he said, “There’s dark humor in it, but the emotional part is there, too. But he remains chastened by his brief exile from Marvel. The 54-year-old Gunn has let his spiky hair go white and grown a tidy accompanying beard, giving him a look that’s more mad scientist than industry upstart. Gunn, whose credits include the low-budget genre satires “Slither” and “Super,” spoke in late June in a video interview from Vancouver, British Columbia, where he is working on “Peacemaker,” a TV spinoff of “The Suicide Squad” starring that jingoistic adventurer played by John Cena. But it’s not as weird as it would be in our universe.”

His entry, “The Suicide Squad,” which he wrote and directed, chronicles a motley team of criminals, including the marksman Bloodsport (Idris Elba) and the saboteur Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), selected by the ruthless Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) to complete a seemingly impossible mission.Īs Gunn explained, “There’s a sort of magical realism that we come into this film with. had tapped him to make a movie in its own superhero universe based on DC Comics characters. Gunn had spent the months after his firing reflecting on himself while also working on an unexpected opportunity: Warner Bros.

In March 2019, Gunn was hired back to the film franchise. Gunn publicly apologized and his “Guardians” stars, including Chris Pratt and Zoe Saldana, rallied to his defense in an open letter. “It seemed like everything was gone,” he said recently. Gunn was fired from a planned third “Guardians” movie and he believed his career was over. Now they had been resurfaced, steering waves of criticism his way. Gunn, the filmmaker behind Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” science-fiction series, had tweeted many deliberately crude jokes about the Holocaust, the 9/11 attacks, AIDS, pedophilia and rape. One day in July 2018, James Gunn discovered that he was trending on Twitter and not for a good reason.

Suicide squad get the joker