The DC Extended Universe has recently expanded with a well-received movie by an admired and talented director and writer James Gunn, who is also known for his works like Guardians of the Galaxy and Super. His newest movie, The Suicide Squad, has the internet appreciating its great direction, fantastic characters, incredible acting and the most adorable murderous humanoid shark in movie history. A big standout of the cast is its unique and nonconventional villain – instead of antagonist that’s exactly the same as the main hero but with a different color, the Suicide Squad faces off against a giant psychic alien starfish known as Starro the Conqueror. Too bad RWBY did it first.
Sure, Starro has a long and storied history. It is literally the first enemy that the Justice League faced. However, apart from some sporadic appearances in comics, Starro was largely ignored up until the fever-dream-ish RWBY/Justice League comic, where, surprise surprise, RWBY and Justice League also face-off against Starro. It has a similar enough design to the one in the movie, and also mind-controls people with little baby Starros that facehug their hosts. All in all, suspiciously similar to the Starro in the movie. But did you know that the RWBY/Justice League issue that revealed Starro as the main antagonist was #9, which released on May 11, 2021? That’s right! 109 days earlier than the movie’s release date.
According to a source that’s worked on the production but I’m willing to keep anonymous because I ain’t no snitch, James Gunn was seen reading the RWBY/Justice League issues during lunch breaks of shooting The Suicide Squad and was “definitely confused by some choices made in the comic.” Additionally, a different anonymous source that you wouldn’t know because he goes to a different school told me that James Gunn rewrote the script to have the titular Suicide Squad fight Starro only after seeing how cool he was in the comic book. “Screw Superman, I want Harley and her friends fight Starro instead, like Team RWBY,” reportedly said James Gunn.
Now, some of you keen and easily irritated commenters have some counterpoints to our claims. I’m going to do my journalistic part and refute them before you can even voice them!
It’s just a coincidence – Starro is an interesting villain that’s fought by groups of heroes! It makes perfect sense why two unrelated properties featured it!
It can’t be a coincidence because in filmmaking there are no coincidences. RWBY is an Rooster Teeth property, owned by Warner Media. The Suicide Squad is a movie in the DC Extended Universe, also owned by Warner Media. Large media companies often cross-promote two different properties, exactly like they did with RWBY and Justice League. And what’s a better way to introduce RWBY to the filmgoers than to introduce a common enemy first? When Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn and Idris Elba’s Bloodsport will finally meet Blake and Yang in an upcoming movie, there’d already be a connection and the audience could more easily understand team RWBY. Am I saying that Warner Media executives figured this out and secretly downloaded a bunch of comics to James Gunn’s phone, hoping he’d read them on a lunch break and go: “hey, it’s got the Justice League so I might as well read it as part of research,” so that he’d rewrite his script? Well I’m not NOT saying it…
The timeframe is all wrong. There’s no way a movie could undergo a re-write of such a large scale and still finish production in time.
Good point. An even better point is that the comic itself was planned out and written way before we saw it. It could be that James Gunn only read the initial draft of the comic or simply was asked to have Starro featured in the film, and the comic’s eventual release only cemented this decision.
There is no proof! Can’t you just ask James Gunn yourself?
My proof is anonymous and also my uncle works at DC so he told me. I’d like to ask Mr. Gunn himself, but last I checked he was too busy dunking on stupid clickbait websites that make up stories for clout.
Oh wait.