The movie is called The Suicide Squad. Characters are expected to die… even a ton of them in the opening scene! But there was one character that James Gunn couldn’t eliminate as he was going through early drafts of his DC standalone feature, and during a recent interview with CinemaBlend, he told us the whole story.
Daniela Melchior plays Ratcatcher 2 in James Gunn’s DC ensemble, the daughter of the original Ratchatcher (Taika Waititi, shown in flashbacks) who has the ability to control rats. It’s really gross. And during interviews for The Suicide Squad, Gunn let it slip that in an early draft, Melchior’s character would have died in the ending of the film. So when we got time with the director, we asked him how it would have happened. He admitted that he took this sequence out of the script before he actually submitted it to Warner Bros., but the way that James Gunn remembers it, Ratcatcher 2 would have died this way:
At the very end of the movie, Ratcatcher 2 had taken the information about from Jotunheim. She had smuggled in and gotten away with all of that information from Jotunheim, and the rest of the group didn't know about it. And (Amanda) Waller blew up her head, after they went back to the prison! At which point, Harley tries to talk Bloodsport -- Bloodsport’s freaking out, because he's connected to this person, like a daughter. And he's freaking out, and Harley is actually being sort of kind, in a weird way, trying to talk Bloodsport into just letting it go. But Bloodsport ends up shooting Waller in the heart with a combustible bullet and threatening to blow her up. It was sort of complicated, but it was something like that. He didn't shoot her in the heart. He shot her right below the heart with one of the exploding bullets, which we see Peacemaker using earlier in the movie. And so now she has to do what he says.
Yeah, we really want to see that play out somehow. Over the course of the movie, Idris Elba’s Bloodsport does take a liking to Daniela Melchior’s Ratcatcher 2, even reaching a point where he’s able to pet her rat as they complete the mission. Seeing her die, courtesy of Amanda Waller’s (Viola Davis) explosive charges, would have been devastating. And it would have been in character for Bloodsport to then place an exploding bullet in Waller’s chest, wrestling back a little sliver of control. Harley begging Bloodsport to calm down would have been a great scene for Margot Robbie, too. Bloodsport must have been off his meds if even Harley thought he needed to dial it back.
James Gunn went on the explain why he removed this ending for The Suicide Squad out of his final draft, telling CinemaBlend:
It was just too dark for me. It was really just too dark. It didn't really work for me. It didn't really tell the story that I wanted to tell, which is much more about the characters’ different journeys, emotionally. And for me, really, the ending with Bloodsport petting the rat... that, to me, was the perfect ending for the movie.
We agree, though we do wish that Gunn somehow had shot footage of a rehearsal with that scene, just to be able to see it play out. For now, it will remain in our imaginations. The rest of The Suicide Squad will soon be ours to own, as it reaches DVD, Blu-ray and 4K disc on Tuesday, October 26.
