Warning: Contains spoilers for Peacemaker season 1.
The Peacemaker season 1 finale left ARGUS in limbo, and it could mean that Suicide Squad 3 might be another soft reboot. The first Suicide Squad movie came from David Ayer in 2016. The film was not well received and various behind-the-scenes issues meant that certain actors were unlikely to return in the future. In 2021, James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, which introduced Peacemaker, served as a soft reboot, keeping Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller, but discarding a lot of the setup and larger ideas that the 2016 movie had established.
In Peacemaker season 1, Leota Adebayo (Danielle Brooks) has been pressured into taking a job with ARGUS by her mother, Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) herself. Waller believes that Adebayo could be a great agent and wants her help in setting Peacemaker up to take the fall for Project Butterfly if or when anything goes wrong. However, Adebayo has a stronger moral compass than her mother and can’t face betraying people who trust her. In the final scenes of Peacemaker season 1, Adebayo holds a press conference where she exposes Task Force X, Amanda Waller, and the missions that have been operated out of Belle Reve in inhumane conditions.
It is unclear exactly what the consequences of Adebayo’s Peacemaker press conference will be beyond a very awkward Thanksgiving. However, with Task Force X being made public and put in a very negative light, there are certainly going to have to be some changes to how the program is run if it is able to continue at all. Amanda Waller might face some form of jail time, but the best-case scenario for her would being shuffled into different sectors where she didn’t have the same power that she did before. Without Amanda Waller in charge, Suicide Squad 3 loses the one thing that could have reliably tethered it to the previous movies, meaning that at bare minimum it will feel like another soft reboot.
However, this ultimately might not be a bad thing. Through the two Suicide Squad movies and Peacemaker, Amanda Waller has been established as someone with no ethics but a lot of power. The character has already been explored as much as she reasonably can be without shaking things up: Suicide Squad 3 with Waller still in charge would have very much the same feel as the other movies. By following up the Peacemaker plotline with Amanda Waller receiving a demotion, even being made an agent again, a different dynamic can be explored for the character and Amanda Waller can grow as a character in a similar way to Peacemaker.
Of course, it is possible that all of this is mildly optimistic. Amanda Waller is extremely good at clinging to power, throwing other people under the bus, and generally talking her way out of problems. Even with Adebayo going public with her name, Waller may still be able to continue her operations, even if they need to be under a new name. As for Task Force X, after it is made public in Peacemaker, some will call for it to be shut down. However, other media pundits would doubtless question whether having criminals risk their lives was really a bad thing (Peacemaker does demonstrate that the DCEU has a stand-in for InfoWars, after all). While Task Force X might be shut down, it could just as easily continue in a slightly changed format, potentially with more oversight. Ultimately, Suicide Squad 3 is destined to take the team in a whole new direction, but it will still be able to continue within the same universe.
