Jonathan Cutayar

The more I think about James Gunn's THE SUICIDE SQUAD canon podcast, the more I wonder if the intended audience wasn't really the fans. What if it was David Ellison? Think about it. Gunn just spent nearly an hour explaining which parts of a five-year-old movie are canon to the DCU. A movie he previously described as an "imperfect memory" is now apparently the FIRST canonical DCU film. Why now? Gunn says it's to celebrate DC Super-Villains Month, but this feels like an awful lot of effort to answer a question that wasn't exactly keeping people up at night. Then I started thinking about the Skydance takeover. Under David Zaslav, Gunn and Peter Safran were given considerable creative freedom to build their universe. Now they're answering to a new corporate leadership team headed by David Ellison, a guy who actually comes from film production and has a personal interest in where these franchises are going. Gunn has even acknowledged that Ellison wanted to know the secrets of the DCU and where the story was headed. So here's my theory. What if Ellison wants a clearer understanding of what he's actually inherited? What's canon? What's being carried over? What is Gunn building toward? Because Gunn and Safran might run DC Studios, but Ellison is ultimately one of the people signing off on their future. And if he decides something needs to change, that creative freedom only goes so far. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but Gunn seemed oddly stiff during the podcast. It felt less like something he was excited to do and more like something he needed to get on the record. And I can't shake the feeling that this whole thing was less about explaining the DCU to fans and more about establishing what the DCU actually is for the guy who just bought the company. Because there's a big difference between telling fans to trust your vision and having to explain that vision to the guy who can change it.