Before James Gunn got control of DC Studios, he’d already made a DC movie. 2021’s The Suicide Squad, a tangentially related follow-up to 2016’s Suicide Squad, was Gunn’s first foray into DC and showed a definite adoration for the brand. One that, a few years later, would lead him to make Peacemaker, Superman, Creature Commandos, and more as one of two presidents of DC Studios.
However, fans have always wondered: Is The Suicide Squad canon to the DC Universe? Gunn’s DCU, officially, started with the animated series Creature Commandos, released in late 2024. Season one of Gunn’s Peacemaker, released in 2022, was eventually tagged as mostly canon because its second season, released in 2025, was fully canon. Then, of course, everything released since—Superman, Supergirl, Lanterns, etc.—has fit in. Even Blue Beetle, a film released right before Gunn took over, will be retroactively looped in.
But what about The Suicide Squad? Well, a few canon DC stories have already mentioned the film’s giant starfish, teasing the connection, and this week, Gunn and DC launched a one-off podcast called “The Suicide Squad: Is It Canon? The Official Podcast” to answer that very question. It was just a trailer, with the full episode not supposed to be released until Friday, October 30, but GamesRadar+ got some sort of early preview of Gunn revealing that, yes, The Suicide Squad is canon. Mostly.
“I think that The Suicide Squad is within the canon of the DCU. It’s decided,” Gunn said. “I’d say we have one small asterisk, which is what exactly is the future of Harley Quinn? I want to be given a little leeway with this by the fans, because I’m not sure exactly how that’s going to manifest itself.”
Harley Quinn, of course, was played by Margot Robbie in both Suicide Squad films and she, over basically every other person in the film, has continued to become an even bigger star. So Gunn is leaving the door open for her to return, but isn’t 100% sure if she even wants to.
“I love [Robbie] as Harley, I don’t know if she wants to play Harley again. She may be over that,” Gunn said. He wants to use the character in the DCU though, and “if Margot wants to play her, I’ll bend over backwards to explain that in the world. But if she doesn’t, right, then I might go with somebody else, where I don’t have to be attached to what happens to Harley in this movie. That’s really the situation.”
But with the potential exception of Harley Quinn, The Suicide Squad is now canon.
“Other than that, I think that we can pretty much say the entire movie is canon. I don’t think there’s a problem,” Gunn said. “Now, maybe somebody’s going to come to me on Threads—and I accept the challenges in trying to answer them—with something that can’t be canon within this movie, and that’s okay, because we’re going to make mistakes, we’re going to make mistakes in this movie, we’re going to make mistakes in other movies. But for the most part, I think that it actually fits much more easily into canon than Peacemaker season 1 does. So, I think that we can actually say that yes, not only is The Suicide Squad canon, but it’s the first canon film in the DCU, and that everybody should go watch it right now on HBO Max.”
Couldn’t have ended the article any better myself.
The full podcast should be uploaded soon, and it promises to have even more info and dissection of the film. Gunn’s next film is Man of Tomorrow, a Superman follow-up that opens on July 9, 2027.
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