James Gunn's The Suicide Squad promises to do for DC what his Guardians of the Galaxy movies did for Marvel: take some of the company's silliest comic characters and give them genuinely impactful dramatic character arcs without sacrificing said silliness. Gunn is a director who says the character in his movie he relates to on the deepest level is Polka-Dot Man, after all. Therefore, it's not entirely surprising that during the DC FanDome panel for The Suicide Squad, he revealed his favorite Batman villain growing up was the silliest of them all: Bat-Mite.
Bat-Mite is essentially the Batman equivalent of the Superman foe Mister Mzyxptlk, an imp with reality-warping fifth-dimensional abilities who's more comedic nuisance than threatening supervillain. Whereas Mzyxptlk is intentionally antagonistic towards Superman, Bat-Mite is a fan of Batman and desperately wants to join his team to Batman's great annoyance. Created by Bill Finger and Sheldon Moldoff in 1959, he was retired from the Batman comics just five years later when editor Julius Schwartz pushed the series in a more serious direction, but has reappeared in assorted stories over the years and even received his own six-issue miniseries in 2015.
There have been several animated incarnations of Bat-Mite, most notably the fourth-wall-breaking one played by Paul Reubens in multiple episodes of Batman: The Brave and the Bold, but no live-action versions of the character thus far. Gunn claims he tried to work in his beloved trickster character into The Suicide Squad but just wasn't able to make it work. Some characters might be too silly to fit into a gritty war movie, even a gritty war movie starring King Shark and Polka-Dot Man.
Perhaps if Gunn directs any future DC films, he'll be able to find a more natural way to include Bat-Mite in the mix. And who knows, with a year until its release, maybe The Suicide Squad could still work in a post-credits surprise akin to the reveal of Howard the Duck in Guardians of the Galaxy.
Written and directed by James Gunn, The Suicide Squad stars Viola Davis as Amanda Waller, Joel Kinnaman as Rick Flagg, Michael Rooker as Savant, Flula Borg as Javelin, David Dastmalchian, as Polka-Dot Man, Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, Daniela Melchior as Ratcatcher, Idris Elba as Bloodsport, Mayling NG as Mongal, Peter Capaldi as The Thinker, Alice Braga as Solsoria, Steve Agee as King Shark, Pete Davidson as Blackguard, Nathan Fillion as TDK, Sean Gunn as Weasel, Jai Courtney as Captain Boomerang, John Cena as Peacemaker, Taika Waititi and Storm Reid. The film arrives in theaters Aug. 6, 2021.