James Gunn was fired by Disney but, if the rumors are true, now hired by Warner Bros. The controversial director has been tagged to write, and possibly direct, a reboot of the 2016 DCEU spectacle 'Suicide Squad'.
Bad as the original ‘Suicide Squad’ movie was, it did end up being a financial success for Warner Bros. Hence the studio’s desire to commission another movie. More importantly, the original 'Suicide Squad' movie led to a noticeable bump in prices of both Suicide Squad comics and those of related characters. Here I want to take a look at some of the Suicide Squad team key comics in order to speculate about the effect that a successful Gunn helmed movie might have.
What comics and characters will the follow up movie make use of? How will James Gunn’s involvement change the direction and atmosphere or tone of the 'Suicide Squad' film? While the second question is too difficult to answer at this point, we can speculate a bit about the first point.
Simply by virtue of having another 'Suicide Squad' movie, I think the original appearances of this DC team, especially the Copper Age ones, will see a boost.
Brave and the Bold #25 (August 1959) - First appearance of Suicide Squad
The Silver Age premier and first-ever appearance of the team actually did see a boost back in 2016. It’s currently trending downwards in all except 8.5 grade (understandably so, given that this original team has nothing to do with the characters in the movies), but given its scarcity and lack of high grade copies, this comic will probably remain valuable regardless of whether there’s another movie or not. The last Ebay sale of a certified 8.5 copy went for an astounding $16, 700.00…in, naturally, 2016.
This comic has mostly retained its value since the 2016 movie. There were basically no certified copies for sale before that time…literally a dollar bin book- even so, a good one given that John Ostrander and John Byrne were both at creative peaks when they worked on this mini-series - but since then it can regularly fetch around $70.00 in 9.8 certified form on the market. Best returns however, have been on 9.2 grades which are up + 122.5% since 2016. That said, the highest price level reached by a 9.2 at that time was $69.00 for an Ebay sale on 05/21/2016. The long and the short of it: a highly affordable key that may see a bump into triple digit sales with the release of another (more successful) film.
This comic most definitely saw a rise in value after the first movie premiered. Currently it sits at $170.00 fair market value for 9.8 certified copies. With recorded sales trending down in every grade, and these are pronounced lows: on 8.0 certified copies, negative -15.7%, on 9.4 graded copies negative -13.9% and on 9.8 certified sales, negative -31.7% (ouch!) over the last ten sales going back to June of 2017.So, a new movie may give this book a kick-start to again reach the three and four hundred dollar highs it did in early 2017. If you’re a gambler, this one seems like it might be worth placing a bet on around this time.
