'The Suicide Squad' Plot Details Revealed, Film Has More Special Effects Shots Than Many Other Marvel Movies Combined

Writer/director James Gunn has wrangled an eccentric cast of characters for The Suicide Squad, a team-on-a-mission movie inspired by films like The Dirty Dozen. While he has teased some of the story so far, a new interview sees him finally pulling back the curtain a bit more to give us a better idea of what this film is about. And it sounds like it's going to be big.

In the new edition of Empire Magazine, Gunn swears The Suicide Squad is a far bigger film than either of his two Guardians of the Galaxy movies. "It was becoming more and more bluescreen on my other movies, an it sort of bums me out a little bit to be spending three weeks on a set that is just a few painted purple rocks. But The Suicide Squad is a big film with so many practical effects. We were really building giant sets."

The movie was so big, in fact, that WB told producer Peter Safran that "this is the largest construction project on any movie they've ever done." More than 100 sets were built for this film – and they're heading to an area that may be familiar to fans of the Arrow-verse and DC Comics. The movie's mission sends the team to a fake Latin American island called Corto Maltese, and Safran laid out the overarching goal: "There they have to destroy a Nazi-era prison and laboratory named Jotunheim, where political prisoners were held and experimentations took place." Sounds a lot like this will be DC's version of Bad Robot's WWII thriller Overlord...though I suspect even more of the team members will die here than they did in Overlord.

DC's competition with its rivals over at Marvel Studios continued in a different arena, too. Dan Sudick has worked as a special effects supervisor on every Marvel movie to shoot in Atlanta, and he also worked in that same position on The Suicide Squad. "He thinks he did more special effects on this movie than all the Marvel movies combined," Gunn said. "And that really is true, because we're crushing cars, we're blowing up tons of stuff, we're doing tons of squibs...we could do whatever we wanted. There are no rules in terms of sex and violence and things like that." (Keep in mind that special effects refers to effects that actually happen on a set, whereas visual effects are added in post-production.)

As for a potential sequel to The Suicide Squad, Gunn says that's "definitely a possibility," and he says he has already written "seven-and-a-half of the eight" episodes of an HBO Max show centering on John Cena's Peacemaker character. The Suicide Squad is set to hit theaters on August 6, 2021, and Peacemaker has not set a premiere date yet.