Writer-director David Ayer brought the title team to life in 2016's Suicide Squad, but plans for a sequel stalled out since then. Plus, there was a whole lot of drama behind the scenes that kind of killed any momentum the DC Comics / Warner Bros. antihero movie had. However, you can't keep a good director down, and you definitely can't turn down the opportunity to bring yet another comic book property back to the big screen. It worked out pretty well for DC/WB with Joker, so they're at it again with plans for a 2021 release of The Suicide Squad, this time written and directed by James Gunn.

Except The Suicide Squad won't be a sequel. It won't continue the story set down by Ayer a few years back, but it will include some of the same characters and, more confusingly, the actors who played them. Earlier this year, producer Peter Safran called it a "total reboot":

“First of all, we don’t call it Suicide Squad 2 ‘cause it’s a total reboot, so it’s The Suicide Squad and I think people should be extremely excited about it. It’s everything you would hope from a James Gunn script and I think that says a lot and that promises a lot and I know that we will deliver a lot.”

Now, Ayer is weighing in on Gunn's project, not only lending his support to it but also tweaking the way we talk about it somewhat. So it's gone from a sequel to a total reboot to, now, a reinvention:

Opening August 6, 2021, The Suicide Squad stars: Margot Robbie, Idris Elba, Viola Davis, Michael Rooker, Joel Kinnaman, Jai Courtney, John Cena, Nathan Fillion, David Dastmalchian, Taika Waititi, Alice Braga, Sean Gunn, Storm Reid, Pete Davidson, Flula Borg, Peter Capaldi, Joaquín Cosío, Mayling Ng, Juan Diego Botto, Steve Agee, Tinashe Kajese, Daniela Melchior, Julio Ruis, and Jennifer Holland.