For months, one of the biggest mysteries about James Gunn's The Suicide Squad film has been who Idris Elba will play in the movie. Originally, people believed that he was going to be a recast Deadshot, but then other theories abounded, like Bronze Tiger and Deathstroke.
At DC FanDome, the answer was finally revealed - Elba will be playing Bloodsport!
If your first instinct is to say, "Who?" or "Wait, you mean the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie?" then that is quite natural, as Bloodsport is a very minor character from DC's comic book universe, but as we have seen from some of the other members in the film (like Polka Dot Man, Blackguard and Javelin), Gunn is all about using DC's long history to come up with interesting members for his new version of the Suicide Squad.
Bloodsport debuted back in 1987, in one of the earliest issues of John Byrne's Superman reboot. One of the main things that Byrne sought out to do with his new approach to Superman was to modernize the book and give Superman some more topical villains. You wouldn't normally see a gun-toting psychopath be a Superman villain before Crisis on Infinite Earths.
Bloodsport's hook is that he was a draft dodger who ran away to Canada to avoid serving in the Vietnam War (Superman #4 even makes a point of noting that he had no objections to the war on a moral standpoint, he was just a coward). His younger brother served in the military and suffered horrible injuries. Seeing his younger brother badly injured made him snap and he sought to punish the rest of the country for not deserving the sacrifice that his brother made for them.
Lex Luthor stepped in and supplied Bloodsport with weapons and a teleportation system that allowed him to teleport any weapon he wanted from his cache right to his hands. This included a weapon with kryptonite bullets. Bloodsport shot Superman with one of these bullets and almost killed the Man of Steel. Gunn is adapting that aspect of Bloodsport's back story. Storm Reid will play Bloodsport's daughter in the film (presumably the Vietnam War back story will be completely excised and he will have more of a father/daughter situation like Deadshot in the first Suicide Sqaud film) and when she asked at The Suicide Swuad DC FanDome panel who shot Superman, Elba confirmed that it was Bloodsport and that that is why he is in prison in the film.
The original Bloodsport was later killed by a white supremacist who took over the Bloodsport identity. Years later, though, Geoff Johns introduced a third Bloodsport, who was once again a Black man.
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.