USATODAY.COM – Whether you’re saving the world, solving a case, trying to stay alive on an alien planet or busting ghosts, it’s nice to have a friend or a few by your side. And sometimes they come from the unlikeliest of places.

This summer at the cinema, some of the biggest movies around will showcase BFFs and teammates who have to work together for the common good and our entertainment. It’s not as fun with just one hero around, and there’s definitely an art to crafting these kinds of films.

“It’s not making it feel like a formula … where everything’s fish out of water, one’s this, one’s that, one eats crappy food, the other’s a health-food nut,” says The Nice Guys co-writer and director Shane Black, who has been putting together big-screen team-ups since Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon.

Here are 10 sets of movie characters this summer whose opposites attract in the best of ways:

Suicide Squad (Aug. 5)
With this many supervillains in one movie, the sky’s the limit when it comes to oddball relationships — be it the connection between the psychopathic Joker (Jared Leto) and crazy bad girl Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), or the black-ops squad of Harley, Deadshot (Will Smith), Captain Boomerang (Jay Courtney) and other powerful convicts formed to take on an evil adversary. For writer/director David Ayer, the fun was in creating a family and then having them do incredible things as a unit: The movie takes “these people who are rejected by the world, who think they aren’t good people, beyond just ‘Hey, we’re villains and we do bad things’ but are really people who believe they are deserving of love and friendship.”