After the mixed reaction – to say the least – to 2016’s Suicide Squad, it was always going to be interesting to see if DC attempted a follow-up or abandon the project altogether.
With such a star-studded cast and no small amount of backing behind it, however, it would have been odd – if favourable – to leave Suicide Squad dead in the water.
Instead, the studio have done the only sensible thing – aside from rebooting it completely – and focused in on the only decent character to emerge from the film – Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn – and give her her own film.
It’s titled (extravagantly): Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), and the trailer for it has just been released.
Watch the Birds of Prey trailer below:
If you’re thinking you’ve seen this before, you may well be right, as Warner Bros. exclusively screened it before select viewings of It Chapter Two. For those of us who didn’t rush to the cinema to see our childhood fears of killer clowns play out before our eyes, however, the Birds of Prey trailer is now available to the rest of us.
The new movie will see Robbie as Quinn, teaming up with a group of like-minded femme fatales to save/ruin the day. Up until now, plot details have been kept under strict lock and key.
Joining Robbie will be Scott Pilgrim‘s Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who plays Huntress, Jurnee Smollett-Bell as Black Canary, Ella Jay Basco as Cassandra Cain, and Rosie Perez as Gotham police detective Renee Montoya.
Speaking to Total Film about the upcoming movie, Mary Elizabeth Winstead said:
You can expect something really fun and a bit wild and totally unique.
Every day we were there [on set], we were doing something that just felt really weird and unlike anything else I’ve seen before in this genre. It was incredibly exciting to get to do that. We really got to work. We just played, and we had fun.
While screenwriter Christina Hodson added:
It’s not a traditional team-up. So then it was about finding fun, inventive ways of doing that. Warners were very supportive in terms of letting me go off-leash.
With the wealth of superhero films out at the moment, it’ll certainly be interesting to see how Birds of Prey aims to break the mould, before Robbie returns to the reboot/almost entirely new version of James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad.
Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) flies into cinemas on February 7, 2020.
If you have a story you want to tell send it to UNILAD via story@unilad.com
Charlie Cocksedge is a journalist and sub-editor at UNILAD. He graduated from the University of Manchester with an MA in Creative Writing, where he learnt how to write in the third person, before getting his NCTJ. His work has also appeared in such places as The Guardian, PN Review and the bin.