Fired Marvel director James Gunn will reportedly write and direct the next Suicide Squad for DC

It looks like Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn is ready to start competing against the company that fired him.

Gunn is reportedly in talks to write and direct the next Suicide Squad movie for Warner Bros. and DC Entertainment, The Wrap reports. This is the first news of a fresh project from Gunn since Disney dramatically fired him from the Marvel franchise due to resurfaced offensive tweets, which were posted years earlier and dug up by far-right personality Mike Cernovich. Gunn launched the Guardians of the Galaxy series with the hit 2014 film, returning for its even more successful 2017 sequel. A third movie was in the works for 2020, and Gunn had already completed a script for it with plans to direct, but he was fired by Disney a few months before pre-production was set to begin.

Now, Gunn is apparently headed to Disney's direct competitor to work on what is essentially the DC equivalent of Guardians of the Galaxy. Like the franchise Gunn launched on screen, Suicide Squad is also about a group of morally-questionable characters who come together in order to do good, although Gunn's Guardians films have been critically beloved while the first Suicide Squad film was widely panned. Potentially due to that negative reception, Gunn's Suicide Squad will apparently be a "whole new take" and not exactly a sequel to the 2016 movie, per The Hollywood Reporter's Borys Kit.

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This would appear to completely shut the door on any chance of Gunn returning to Marvel, although the odds of that were already doubtful after Disney CEO Bob Iger said last month that he stood by the decision to remove Gunn from Vol. 3. Still, Gunn's brother has said that Marvel intends to produce Vol. 3 using the same script that Gunn had completed before he was fired, meaning two similar comic book films with Gunn's involvement will now be in the works at rival studios at the same time.