The DCEU’s greatest achievement was a film career for Harley Quinn

04.01.2024 - 18:25 / polygon.com / David Ayer / Harley Quinn / James Gunn

Some things end with a bang, some with a whimper, and some with Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. Thanks to a mix of creative and corporate overhaul, the sequel to a film that made over $1.15 billion has been rendered as little more than a postscript to the dissolving DC Extended Universe project. Set to be replaced by a new shared universe in the next few years, one overseen by comic book whisperer James Gunn, all that’s left now is to clear through the rubble of what was once Warner Bros.’ attempt to rival Disney at its interconnected game and see what was done right.

The main answer to that is pretty easy to glean: Harley Quinn. A character that first emerged as the fanatic gun moll to the Joker in the classic Batman: The Animated Series was given a live-action shot on the big screen thanks to the DCEU, and she would end up being perhaps the most consistent thing about it. The DCEU’s biggest impact lay far away from the familiar territories of Batman and Superman — it was always best when it shied away from the familiar and allowed characters like Harley Quinn to shine.

That’s not to say that Harley Quinn had been somehow rescued from obscurity. Along with Marvel’s Venom, she’s the most famous bad guy introduced in the modern era of comics. Thanks to her appealing mix of naivete and bloodthirstiness, she quickly grew to rival the infamy of the clown she’d been paired with, and many of her episodes in BTAS (like “Harley and Ivy” and “Mad Love”) are considered some of the best in the series. Creators at DC Comics put her development into overdrive in the 2010s, with a spot on a revamped Suicide Squad and her own still-running series, which built a life for her outside of Gotham City and had her emphatically break up with the Joker. In 2019, she even got a cartoon of her own, one that placed her as the lead among a beloved band of weirdos and outcasts and eventually pushed her comics-canon romantic relationship with Poison Ivy to the forefront.

But success in movies had, like it had for development hell regulars like Aquaman and the Flash, eluded her. She was apparently set to debut as the Joker’s vengeful daughter in Batman Unchained, a film that would’ve been director Joel Schumacher’s third stab at the franchise. However, Batman & Robin’s one-two punch of a lackluster box-office gross and some of the worst reviews ever hurled at a major IP blockbuster put a stop to that. As such, she languished, always seeming like the kind of character that would be great if someone would just give her a chance.

In a way, Harley Quinn’s role in the first Suicide Squad reflects her status amid the wider DCEU. That the movie was a post-production nightmare is an open secret now — Director David Ayer’s initial