Will Smith Will Not Return For James Gunn’s Suicide Squad Soft-Reboot

After portraying Floyd Lawton / Deadshot in director David Ayer’s 2016 cinematic dumpster fire Suicide Squad, actor Will Smith has declined to return for the forthcoming soft-reboot set to be helmed by Guardians of the Galaxy’s James Gunn.

The news comes at the culmination of a chain of events, primarily incited by the alt-right cyber smear-campaign against Gunn last year, following unsavoury jokes he’d made on social media some ten years ago (and subsequently already publicly apologised for) which led to Disney putting their foot down and demanding the director’s termination from his forthcoming Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3. This left Gunn with an opening, something that rival studio Warner Bros. seized upon – hiring the man to do a soft-reboot of their ailing Suicide Squad ‘franchise’ (if one can call a single terrible movie a franchise), by imprinting his own signature anarchic style upon the film.

By all accounts, it seems now that the director will in fact primarily be adapting the concept of the Suicide Squad (expendable B-Z tier villains enlisted by the government for unsavoury black ops missions to lower their prison time – thus giving an in-universe reason for the so-called ‘revolving door’ of the justice system in comic books) for his own feature, and very little else. The only two characters that anyone even remotely liked have been entirely removed either by circumstance or choice (with Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn being spliced into Cathy Yan’s Birds of Prey) and the reported soft-reboot – presently titled The Suicide Squad – will introduce a new team entirely.

Despite being critically roasted, the original flick did bring in almost $750 million at the box office, so Warner Bros. are fast-tracking this new project. Gunn is said to be nearing completion of a script, with pre-production set to begin in earnest in the next few months, before shooting begins in the Autumn.

Will Smith can next be seen in Disney and Guy Ritchie’s live-action remake of Aladdin, due out on the 24th of May.