Why There's Been No Batman: Arkham For Three Years

3. An Ill-Fated Suicide Squad Game

Warner Bros.

Those who stuck with Arkham Origins through to its ending will know that the game teased a sequel involving the Suicide Squad. CCH Pounder even reprised her role as Amanda Waller from the Justice League animated series, recruiting the newly incarcerated Slade Wilson for Task Force X.

But though players had presumed that the Squad would be the eventual antagonists for Bats to face off against in a sequel, perhaps in light of Batman: Assault on Arkham (the first and so far only cinematic Arkham spin-off), talk from Montreal's camp indicated otherwise. In a 2016 report from Kotaku's Jason Schreier, it was revealed that Montreal had been working on an actual Suicide Squad game, which would've had players assume the role of Deathstroke. (Fans will also remember that Slade Wilson was playable in Origins' Challenge Maps.)

More interesting, perhaps, was that the title was said to have a Co-Op focus. Origins itself did of course feature an online component where Batman and Robin took on the opposing forces of Joker and Bane, but that was developed by Splash Damage, and their last project was Gears of War 4's multiplayer.

Either way, little is known about the project apart from the fact Warner Bros. were left unconvinced by the studio's pitches. It's also unclear as to whether or not this was the same Suicide Squad game Geoff Johns spoke of a few years back (a title featuring DC's Dirty Dozen did release in 2016), but either way, it looks as though this was the game Montreal moved on to after Origins, and that it was killed off sometime after their work concluded on Arkham Knight's Matter of Family DLC.

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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.