James Gunn has suggested fans won’t need to have watched The Suicide Squad before watching his Peacemaker spinoff series. Starring WWE wrestler turned superstar John Cena as the titular antihero, the eight-episode show is the first in a series of interconnected DCEU television spinoffs planned for the HBO Max streaming service. With the first three Peacemaker episodes due to premiere on January 13, HBO Max is also treating DC fans to a Gotham P.D. series set in the same universe as Matt Reeves’ The Batman, and a Justice League Dark series being developed by J.J. Abrams.
Gunn, who made the leap across to the DC universe after temporarily being let go from working on Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy threequel, was given his choice of DC projects before ultimately settling on a soft reboot of 2016’s Suicide Squad. While Gunn’s film would see Margot Robbie, Viola Davis, Joel Kinnaman and Jai Courtney each reprise their roles from David Ayer’s 2016 Suicide Squad film, his version of Task Force X would also introduce an eclectic lineup of new characters, including Cena’s Peacemaker. A brutal vigilante who prizes peace at any cost, Gunn has previously described the character as the “world’s biggest douchebag.” The director returned to the character and began to pen his own The Suicide Squad-based television series while in COVID-19 lockdown in August 2020, which he says was initially “mostly for fun.”
Most recently, in another of his popular social media Q&A’s, Gunn was asked if people needed to have seen The Suicide Squad before watching Peacemaker. Gunn gave a definitive answer to put fans' minds at ease. The director said, “No. We fill you in at the beginning of the show.” Check out his original Tweet below:
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Expected to both explore Peacemaker’s origins, as well as chart his missions after the events of The Suicide Squad, Gunn’s response suggests that new fans will be able to enjoy the series without having been exposed to the 2021 film. This approach is, in itself, nothing new for Gunn, who also approached writing The Suicide Squad in much the same way. Fans also did not need to have seen Ayer's original 2016 film to follow and make sense of the events that were depicted in his soft reboot. Of course, this does not mean the series will not directly reference the events in Gunn’s movie, and a previous trailer has already referred to The Suicide Squad’s Project Starfish.
As DC Extended Universe continues to grow and evolve, Gunn’s approach of enabling new fans to use his projects as easy entry points into the larger franchise a smart move on the director’s part. While the DCEU is still nowhere near as large as the rival Marvel Cinematic Universe, with a veritable flood of new content planned over the coming few years, Warner Bros. could benefit from adopting this same approach in many of their other properties to avoid the franchise from becoming too unwieldy. However, DC fans don't have much longer to wait to see what Gunn has in store for them when Peacemaker makes its streaming debut later this month, giving any keen viewers who haven't seen The Suicide Squad time to fill in the blanks (if they so choose).
Source: James Gunn
