Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League - Why Did Anyone Think This Would Work?

Right now, Summer Game Fest is going on, which means we’re getting what’s basically the new E3. After that is Ubisoft Forward, and the reveal of the new Dragon Age the day after that. So! Games stuff. Let’s hope something good gets announced.

I am almost done with Warrior, and I think I’ll be finished up with season four (the final one that’s on Netflix) of Brooklyn 99. After that… who knows? Death and Other Details will probably be on the list, and after reading a tie-in book, I’m wondering if I should get to re-watching The Librarians, assuming I can find it somewhere.

I have wanted to write something like this for a while, but with the recent article on Bloomberg, I decided to go ahead and write it. Batman Arkham Videos has a short rundown of the article and related information, and doesn’t need a subscription to see, unlike the Bloomberg article (although there are ways around that).

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League - Why Did Anyone Think This Would Work?

Earlier this year, Rocksteady, the studio that developed the influential, award-winning, critically-acclaimed, and incredibly successful Batman Arkham games, released a new game. Unlike their single-player Batman games (despite being set in the same universe), which were focused on stealth and melee action combat with deep, involved and complex plots, this game turned out to be an always-online multiplayer looter-shooter about playing as villains using guns on aliens and also the superheroes like Batman and his allies, who had been irreversibly mind-controlled by alien conqueror Braniac.

To say this game flopped is like saying that the ocean is a little filled with water. When gameplay previewed, reactions were negative from the gaming community; when it released, it was a resounding failure. Not that many people bought it, and the ones who did couldn’t be bothered to keep playing. Not only was this not what fans wanted from the studio as a follow-up to the Batman Arkham games, it wasn’t even good–filled with bugs, repetitive mission design, and a story that made no one happy by unceremoniously killing off the heroes, including the widely loved version of Batman from the Arkham games, voiced by Kevin Conroy, the same guy who voiced him in Batman: The Animated Series, and died not all that recently.

A lot of people have tried to work out why it crashed and burned, and mostly came to the same conclusions; TV Tropes has a good stab at it on their YMMV page for the game. That’s not what we’re here today to try to ask, “Why did anyone think this was a good idea to begin with?” Because the idea of playing an online game as villains working for the government to gun down brainwashed heroes is a bizarre one, which on the surface makes one think it was doomed from the start. And it was! But there’s also little things that led some to think it would be a hit; it’s only when you put it all together, or thought about it for a couple of minutes, that you realize that it wouldn’t work.

So here we go.

ONE: Suicide Squad =/= Guardians of the Galaxy 

I don’t like the whole thing of people trying to compare DC and Marvel, especially in the movies, because it shouldn’t be a one-to-one comparison. They should be somewhat different things. It’s frustrating, then, that Warner Brothers keeps trying to ape the success of Marvel Studios with their movies. If it wasn’t obvious, their 2016 Suicide Squad movie was an attempt to capture the absolute surprise success of Guardians of the Galaxy–a group of outlaw misfits that work together to save the world and bond, proving that they’re more than people think, all while rocking out to licensed music. It made money, but critics didn’t like it very much, to the point that it’s kind of the punching bag of the DCEU.

And then they straight-up hired James Gunn to make a Suicide Squad movie. And it was really good, actually! But he clearly made something different than Ayer’s 2016 attempt, which is why it worked.

The Suicide Squad is not the Guardians of the Galaxy. The entire point of the Suicide Squad is not to fight monsters or save the world. It’s to feature no-name villains carrying out black ops missions for the government, who have really big risks of getting horribly killed on the job. Yeah, there’s a lot of humor, but it’s black humor, and pointing out government corruption. It’s not the big-name, feel-good franchise that everyone’s happy to see all the time. It’s dark, it’s brutal, and it’s not something that’s likely to easily go mainstream. It has ‘suicide’ in the name!

Still, a lot of people really thought that they had DC’s Guardians of the Galaxy with Suicide Squad, and the 2016 movie did make a butt-ton of money. 

TWO: The Boys, Invincible, and Injustice 

Amazon’s The Boys and Invincible are both successful violent superhero deconstructions featuring knock-off versions of Superman as villains; Injustice was a fighting video game (and tie-in comic, and later animated film adaptation) of a world where Superman went evil and had to be stopped. Those victories convinced someone somewhere that what the world really wanted was to shoot Superman in the face. 

Of course, the problem with this reasoning is that in the case of Amazon’s shows, they’re not actually Superman, they’re counterparts made to evoke him, making it much easier to swallow the idea that the audience wants him taken down. It’s not that we necessarily want Superman dead, it’s that we want these twisted versions of him taken down.

The case of Injustice we must also point out that it was a fighting game, and the point was that you also play as different DC characters and fight using different powers and abilities. It wasn’t so much that players wanted to beat on Superman, as much as, “I want to try fighting Superman as Batman,” or whoever, and you and your friends could play as different heroes/villains and fight. And! Key point: in the story mode, you still played as the heroes (for the most part), because you were playing as heroes who wanted to take down evil Superman.

None of this lends credence to the idea that what fans really want to do is shoot at classic superheroes and have their characters gloat about it afterward. It also doesn’t work that this version of Batman is already established as a character, one beloved by players, so no one’s really thrilled about the idea of killing him.

THREE: Live Service Games Make Money

A game’s success isn’t necessarily how many copies it sells (though that is also important), but also how long afterward people are still playing it. In live service games, that also translates to being able to sell stuff, like new outfits and weapons to players, along with new story content and missions. It worked for Destiny 2, after all. AND it’s worth noting that a big game is expensive and time-consuming to make; if you make a successful live-service game, you have a chance to make back a lot of money.

Of course, Rocksteady had no experience making this kind of game, and it seems like the directors didn’t bother to learn about how to do that, either. Which means they were making a type of game that they didn’t know how to make, and the directors didn’t want to learn how to make. They assumed that it would all turn out; and Warner Bros, being run by idjits who hate everything but money, encouraged this behavior because the scent of money makes them lose their minds.

Even after this game came out, Warner Bros. announced that they were planning to do more live service games, despite their best-selling game of last year, the best-selling game of the year, breaking Call of Duty’s record, was a single-player game with none of the live service elements (Hogwarts Legacy); but because doing more games that big that don’t suck is too risky to bet big money on, they thought this was a good way to make money, and apparently told everyone that they were sure this was going to make money.

Then again, they told everyone that The Flash was “one of the greatest superhero movies ever made,” and look how that turned out.

FOUR: The Infinity Saga

An insider claimed that one of the inspirations behind the story, for one of Rocksteady’s leaders, was Avengers: Infinity War; it had just come out around the time that the game entered development. The idea was that it was quite shocking that the movie ended with the heroes defeated, many of them dead, only for the next movie to bring them back and beat down the villain, Thanos. There was a conviction that SS: KtJL would do the same thing, shockingly kill the main heroes of the universe, and eventually bring them back to win over Braniac.

Except the game itself has very few hints that it’s going to go that way; apparently staff members begged to put more foreshadowing that the heroes wouldn’t be gone forever, but they were refused because someone thought that the shock value would be appealing to players. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t. No one liked it, and while many didn’t think that it was truly the end for the heroes, it still wasn’t accepted by the player base because it was done so unceremoniously and ridiculous. The heroes’ deaths aren’t depicted as tragedies as they are in Infinity War; they’re victories in the game, where the titular squad celebrates and dunks on the people they just shot to death. They all high five over Superman’s corpse, despite knowing that before being mind-controlled, he was as heroic as any ordinary version of the character.

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Again, if the people in charge of this game had stopped and thought about it for a few minutes, they would understand why these ideas don’t work, much less why they wouldn’t all work together. But nope! Someone saw Suicide Squad as an idea that would make them money and prestige, and threw all common sense out of the window to try to make it work. 

This was a disaster for everyone involved. I really hope that the staff of Rocksteady get good work soon, and a management team that isn’t made up of complete idiots. They deserved better, as did the fans who were looking forward to the next outing from them in a superhero universe.

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