Guy Ritchie Wants To Direct ‘Suicide Squad 2’

While Suicide Squad ultimately went on to gross $745.6 million at the box office, the poor critical response to the film means that there’s certainly room for improvement when it comes to its potential sequel. Warner Bros. are currently trying to figure out the best way to move the franchise forward, and they might have just been dealt a very handy helping hand after Guy Ritchie declared his own interest in overseeing the film.

Guy Ritchie, who is currently doing the rounds promoting his upcoming film King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword, was recently asked whether or not he’d like to delve into the superhero genre, and he immediately made it known that he’s got his sights on the follow-up to David Ayer’s divisive Suicide Squad.

“I quite fancy doing Suicide Squad 2 because I felt like I could do a good job with it.”

However, before movie fans start dreaming up a cockney version of the comic-book adaptation, Guy Ritchie admitted that he’s not going to be able to oversee the follow-up because he’s already signed up for a different film.

“I can’t do it because I’m doing something else…but I felt like I could really do something with that.”

The film that Guy Ritchie is signed up to direct is actually a rather big one, because the British director is currently in pre-production on a live-action remake of the Disney classic Aladdin. While it’s hardly surprising that Disney are developing another live-action version of one of their classic films, it did rather startle the cinematic community that Guy Ritchie had been chosen to direct it, as he has previously not dabbled in the musical genre. It has already been confirmed that Aladdin will include and reprise the musical elements of the original film.

Over the past few years, Alice In Wonderland, Maleficent, Cinderella, The Jungle Book, Pete’s Dragon, and, most recently, Beauty And The Beast have grossed a combined total of just under $4.5 billion, which immediately provoked Disney to put into development live-action versions of Mulan, Pinocchio, The Lion King, and Aladdin.

But while Guy Ritchie probably wasn’t the first name that sprung to the mind of movie fans when it was originally announced that Aladdin was in development, Sean Bailey, the president of production over at Walt Disney Pictures, recently explained to Vulture why the Lock, Stock, And Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, RocknRolla, Sherlock Holmes, and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. director managed to convince them he was the perfect candidate.

“Guy became interested in doing a Disney movie and we talked a lot about it. When we talked about Aladdin, he said, ‘My stories are really about street hustlers. That’s what I know how to do. And Aladdin is a classic street hustler who makes good.’ Guy’s got his own version of that story in his life. But he wanted to honor and respect the Disney of it all. We never want to feel like we have a playbook to these things because we worry it’ll make us creatively complacent. The idea of a highly energized Guy Ritchie Disney musical felt like, Oh, we haven’t done that before”

But despite Guy Ritchie’s assertion to Variety, there is actually still an outside chance that he might get to take on Suicide Squad 2. That’s because we already know that production will begin on Aladdin in 2018 ahead of its release date at some point in 2019, while we’re still waiting for confirmation on the direction that Warner Bros will take the Suicide Squad follow-ups, however it has been heavily speculated the studio are currently whittling down their potential list of directors that will replace David Ayer, while Adam Cozad was recently hired as its screenwriter.

[Featured Image by Warner Bros]