Director James Gunn has taken to Twitter and revealed some insight into how he settled on the design for The Suicide Squad’s King Shark. The first trailer for the DCEU’s soft reboot only debuted yesterday, but the anthropomorphized chondrichthye (try pronouncing that ten times in a row) has already become a firm fan favorite.
Of course, that’s to be expected when you’ve got action movie legend Sylvester Stallone lending his signature grumbly tones to a gigantic humanoid shark that likes to bite the heads off bad guys, and the character’s innocent hilarity looks as though it’s going to be one of the many highlights of The Suicide Squad when it hits theaters and HBO Max in August.
In his Twitter thread, Gunn revealed that he and the design team deliberately tried to avoid eliciting awws from the audience along the same lines as a Baby Yoda or the filmmaker’s own Baby Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, but the approach clearly hasn’t worked when the big guy has already been firmly placed in the drawer marked endearingly adorable.
The deep dive into the physiology of King Shark continued when Gunn confessed he made sure that the dad bod would be an integral part of that character's physicality: "I was insistent on the dad-bod from the beginning as I didn’t think King Shark would have such mammalian body structure." Of course not every member of underwater royalty has to be cut from the same jacked and chiseled cloth as Jason Momoa’s Arthur Curry, and King Shark could probably kick Aquaman’s ass anyway — or, at the very least, turn the King of Atlantis into a light snack.
In the comic books, King Shark has often been modeled on a hammerhead shark, but per another tweet, The Suicide Squad’s director believed that would make things too awkward when trying to get the eyelines and visual effects to match, not to mention the requisite widening of his shots, so the decision was made to have him closer resemble a great white after initial tests. Gunn also admitted that it’s a complete coincidence that The Suicide Squad’s King Shark bears a more than a passing resemblance to his animated counterpart from HBO Max’s Harley Quinn, which didn’t air until after the soft reboot for the titular antiheroes had already started shooting.
Additionally, Gunn revealed a particularly exciting detail from the trailer involving a practical effect to create one of King Shark's gnarliest moments of violence (seen above): "In this bit of footage, the Shark is CG of course, but the person is real. Well, not a real person, but a practical effect by our SFX & prosthetics teams that I shot."
What we need now is for Matt Ryan to officially join the DCEU as Constantine so we can see the storyline from the animated Justice League Dark: Apokolips War, where it’s revealed the two dated for a spell. Give us the Constantine/King Shark rom-com we all want to see, you cowards.
The Suicide Squad is slated for a theatrical and HBO Max release on August 6. Check out the start of Gunn's fun thread below.