It appears that Suicide Squad was just a warm-up act. Warner Bros. appears to have committed to another feature where the famed villains of the DC Comics universe wreck havoc with Gotham City Sirens, an all-female project based on a recent comics series. Furthermore, Suicide Squad helmer David Ayer is set to direct the film with Margot Robbie reprising her role of Harley Quinn. The Hollywood Reporter was the first to break this story.
Alongside Harley Quinn, the troublemakers at the center of Gotham City Sirens look likely to include such female villains as Catwoman and Poison Ivy. Catwoman has already been a staple of superhero filmmaking thanks to Michelle Pfeiffer’s iconic take in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, the less-than-famed standalone attempt by Halle Berry in Catwoman and most recently, with Anne Hathaway’s iteration of the character in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises. Poison Ivy, on the other hand, was a featured player in the failed Batman and Robin film with Uma Thurman appearing as the plant specialist. Geneva Robertson-Dworet has been tapped to write the film; she wrote the script for the upcoming Tomb Raider reboot and is attached to pen Sherlock Holmes 3.
While critical and fanboy reception for Suicide Squad was mixed at best, the film scored big at the box office – raking in upwards of $700 million at the worldwide box office – which may have proved the catalyst for Warner Bros. to give Gotham City Sirens the green-light. Robbie’s participation (she will also serve as executive producer on the project) may have helped push it forward as well considering her performance was admired (and recently earned a Critics’ Choice Award for Best Actress in an Action Movie) and developed a cult even before Squad opened in theaters. There’s other Squad-like projects in various stages of development including a sequel and a spin-off focusing on Deadshot, the character portrayed by Will Smith, but Gotham City Sirens appears ahead of the rest, though no release date or production schedule has been confirmed as of yet.
On the onset, Ayer may move ahead to this project after he finishes up the upcoming Netflix science fiction thriller Bright, a film starring Smith and Joel Edgerton (Loving). Watch this space.