Willa Holland (Thea Queen), in an interview with The Mirror, expressed her disappointment with shutting out plans for Suicide Squad in the Arrow TV show and thinks DC Cinematic universe could learn lessons from Marvel. She said “We were about season two when they started telling us we had to start basically killing off the Suicide Squad that we were starting to build on our own. We were actually trying to build that on our own on the show, and I guess once DC found out they were going to be doing their own movie of it, we had to axe all of the characters before we even got to show them, which was a little annoying at first.”
She further added “When Stephen found out there was going to be a Justice League [movie] it only seemed — rightly so — he would be playing Green Arrow on it as well as that Grant [Gustin] would be playing the Flash. It seemed like the right normal answer, and — once they said no — you can’t really fight against them for it because they are the people that gave us a job in the first place. So you just have to sit there on your hands, like okay, I get it! Marvel does it in their own weird way, kind of mash between ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ and the movies and stuff. So it’s a little upsetting because you know it is possible and it can be done and how good it would be if it was done.”
It was particularly striking to see how Arrow creators killed off the head of the US government agency A.R.G.U.S Amanda Waller, she was shot dead at a point blank range by a sinister organization called Shadowspire when she didn’t give away Rubicon codes to them. The other characters of Suicide Squad, for instance, Deadshot was also eliminated. It wasn’t part of the script, in fact the studio forced the TV show to make the necessary changes, as the SUICIDE SQUAD movie was coming up, which had Viola Davis playing Amanda Waller and Will Smith as Deadshot. The movie had a massive opening weekend in the US ($135 million) but it dropped sharply in the second week. There is a speculation that Arrow show-makers may get a go ahead now to do a version of Suicide Squad on the show. But fans believe Amanda Waller was the key to assembling Task Force X while Laila (Diggle’s wife and A.R.G.U.S head) isn’t entirely buying the idea of an elite task force carrying out dangerous missions, especially after what happened with King Shark.
