Less than a month after its release, Spider-Man: No Way Home is about to lose its crown as the most memeable comic book movie release of all time, because James Gunn's Peacemaker is coming. Despite a strangely muted marketing campaign that hasn't yet fully captured the zany, outrageous spirit of Gunn's The Suicide Squad spin-off, the show is a triumph of exactly why the director was handed the reins to both the DCEU and the MCU's weirdest movies. Gunn knows how to take twisted, often silly characters and make you care about them so much that you want to talk about them after: that's not just a knack, it's an artform.
In Peacemaker, Gunn has presented himself with his most difficult challenge yet, because he'd already presented John Cena's Task Force X alumnus as distinctly unlikeable in The Suicide Squad. And that's several degrees beyond an understatement, given Peacemaker killed off Rick Flag and betrayed Task Force X at the behest of the thoroughly reprehensible Amanda Waller (Viola Davis). He was already skirting the line in his macho Bs rivalry with Idris Elba's Bloodsport, but to have him kill off a hero and then present him as the lead of a spin-off seeking to inspire empathy from the same audience was a considerable act. Gunn's done it with such relish that you almost get the sense he's laughing about it, because Peacemaker remains a colossal dirtbag in the process.
The best thing about Peacemaker is that it seeks to find his point of origin, both human and philosophical, and introduces his father Auggie Smith (Robert Patrick) as the answer. Thanks to a not-unsurprising twist, all of the jigsaw pieces fall into place and Peacemaker does an incredible job of once more bottling that patented James Gunn heart. But at the same time, this being a James Gunn release, Peacemaker also has a meme factor that will rival all recent comic book release - up to and including both Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: No Way Home, and in the opening credits sequence, Gunn has surpassed them both. It is the kind of sequence that demands not only full attention but repeated appreciation for full effect. As revealed by producer Peter Safran, the Peacemaker opening credits are a dance number that is joyous, hilarious and so utterly memeable that you can almost hear the interactions now.
This idea of memeability is a fairly new one for movies and TV shows, which grew organically out of the way the audience consumes media now. Slow burn and long-form art are one thing, but the rise of social media has but a premium value on instantaneous pockets of fun, or interesting factoids, or explosive, devastating, or joyful moments, all packaged in bitesize pieces. Meme culture came in with the Hail Mary pass, as fans edited out flashpoint moments to bottleneck reactions, turning spoilers into a commodity and funny, wild, provocative, or particularly loaded moments into the most valuable kind of satellite media. In 2021, despite Willem Dafoe's insistence that he didn't want his Green Goblin to become a meme, No Way Home's social presence after release (and even before it) made it the meme-lord of the year in comic book terms. So valuable were the multiverse returns and the interactions between the Spider-Men that the memes almost wrote themselves as you watched. Peacemaker isn't like that on the same consistent level, but the opening credits number blows No Way Home away.
Just as Baby Groot dancing for the opening of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 justified its existence by the level of fan enjoyment - something No Way Home can also claim of its heavy reliance on character returns, in fact - Peacemaker and the cast dancing to Wig Wam's "Do You Wanna Taste It" is the thing everyone will talk about. It is the show's biggest moment that will be a gif within minutes of Peacemaker's HBO Max release. It defies the skip intro culture, and lands with precision in the laps of those who want everything to be a meme, and there's a very good chance it will become countless fans' favorite thing about the DCEU.
