There's no denying that Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey was similar to Deadpool in a lot of ways, but was it a rip-off of the Marvel Comics adaptation? Some fans have argued that's the case, but when director Cathy Yan was asked about those comparisons - which mostly related to the R-Rating and the fourth wall being broken - she pointed straight to the comic books.
"All of that comes from the comic books in a way - her irreverent voice," Yan tells The Hollywood Reporter. "The entire concept of the movie was very much like 'This is Harley Quinn’s story, and this is the way she’s telling the story. It’s going to be wacky, crazy and jump around in time, and it’s not going to make sense until it does.'"
"It’s so exciting to be able to tell a story and make a movie through Harley Quinn’s eyes. So, breaking the fourth wall was just an element of that. It just felt right for her character; it felt right for the story we were trying to tell including the cheekiness, subversiveness and self-awareness of the tone we were trying to achieve. It didn’t disgust me that people were comparing us to Deadpool."
"I love Deadpool; I think it’s a great movie, but we were very much trying to do our own thing," the filmmaker continued, explaining that an R-Rating was always the plan for her movie.
"I do have to thank the studio for supporting a movie that was never going to be four-quadrant. It was R-rated the entire time, and we never talked about changing the rating to get more people into the theater. It was a risk in many ways, and it was not an exact sequel to Suicide Squad, which would’ve probably been the less-risky version of how we could’ve worked with Harley Quinn."
"It was always going to be this weird, quirky movie — by design — just like Harley Quinn," she concludes.
Everything Yan says here makes sense, and the comparisons to Deadpool do seem to be a tad unnecessary. As we mentioned, there's no denying that there are comparisons between the two franchises, but there's precedent in the comic books for Harley's story to play out the way it did.
Warner Bros. was no doubt hoping that Birds of Prey would be their version of the Merc with the Mouth's popular film series, of course, but things sadly didn't pan out that way for the DC movie.