When we last saw Deadshot in Suicide Squad, he was depicted as a morally conflicted hitman (complete with Christian devotions) who joined Amanda Waller’s Task Force X so that he could have the chance to reunite with his daughter Zoe. Most of Lawton’s recent appearances in the comics, DC Animated Movies, Arrow, and Ayer’s film have focused on his struggle to get back to his daughter. It has become his defining trait outside of his marksmanship. But Zoe didn’t become a part of Deadshot’s story until 2005, and The Suicide Squad has the opportunity to re-discover who the character is beyond those now familiar father-daughter ties. A Golden Age character who began his career as a tuxedo and top hat-clad Batman villain in Batman No. 59 (1960), Deadshot was pulled back from the depths of obscurity by Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers’ 1977-1978 Detective Comics run, collected as Batman: Strange Apparitions, and later in Ostrander and Yale’s Suicide Squad. In the pages of Suicide Squad, Lawton gave new meaning to the title as the team’s sole member who was actually looking for a worthy way to die. Lawton’s death wish frequently saw the character making risky choices, and choosing missions with low-survival rates, efforts that put the rest of his teammates in the crosshairs.

Deadshot’s lack of consideration for life and his own suicidal tendencies seem like ripe material for Gunn to explore, as he has a knack for digging into the core of his characters and making both the seemingly despicable and badass emotional lynchpins. Ostrander and Yale dove into Lawton’s beginnings in their 1988 Deadshot miniseries. A child of abusive parents, a young Floyd Lawton and his brother Edward were drawn into a plot to assassinate their father, George, by their mother who had been paralyzed at George’s hands. Floyd backs out at the last minute but accidentally fires a shot that kills his brother. It’s this act that awakens Floyd to the fact that he cares nothing about life, even when it concerns the people he cares about. Years later, Deadshot is contracted by his mother to finish off his father, when his therapist, Marnie Herrs, who he has developed romantic feelings for interferes, he paralyzes her, a decision that highlights his feelings for her but his ultimate inability to move past violence and develop a sense of empathy. While there are parts of Deadshot’s history that are perhaps too dark, and potentially problematic, for contemporary comic book movies, there’s a lot of psychological damage that could be dealt with. Lawton’s particular condition and inability to see the value of life, and the effect of that, formed one of the central theses of Ostrander and Yale’s Suicide Squad.

Deadshot’s emotional struggles form the crux of the Suicide Squad, and that certainly feels like an angle that Gunn would want to explore. There’s no reason why he should be limited, and that The Suicide Squad shouldn’t be all it can be simply because of the unavailability of an actor. Elba’s replacement of Smith is comparable to the Marvel Cinematic Universe's recasting decisions in which Don Cheadle replaced Terrance Howard as James Rhodes/War Machine, and Mark Ruffalo replaced Edward Norton as Bruce Banner/Hulk. While the circumstances surrounding Deadshot’s recasting seem to be on more amicable terms than those MCU comparisons, they each serve as examples that showcase that these characters place within these worlds are more important than any one actor. There’s also the fact that Deadshot was one of the many projects Warner Bros. has expressed interest in as a feature film. While it always seemed somewhat unlikely with Smith given the actor’s schedule and choosiness over projects, it seems more likely with Elba. With Warner Bros. learning that the DC Universe holds a lot more potential than just Batman and Superman, Deadshot could break out in a major way and finally give Idris Elba the long-earned opportunity to lead an action franchise.