SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t seen all of The Suicide Squad, including the post-credits scene, you may want to turn back now or proceed with caution.
The Peacemaker TV series was announced last year, so it was a little shocking when the character’s fate was revealed in James Gunn‘s gore-filled The Suicide Squad. But if you sat through the credits, a bonus scene reveals that he… got better.
But out of all the characters in The Suicide Squad, why is John Cena’s getting his own series on HBO Max?
Gunn explained:
“Well, I think that it’s a number of things. In the movie… Harley gets a really complete story about herself, she gets a complete arc. Bloodsport gets a complete story. Rick Flag gets a complete story. Ratcatcher 2 gets a complete story. They all learn something about themselves — sometimes good things, sometimes bad things — but Peacemaker is a douche and he stays a douche and he’s an asshole in the movie.”
Gunn further teased a deeper look at this character that may have come across as one-dimensional in the film:
“I think there’s something below that. This guy is a loud, obnoxious, bro-ey douchebag. That sucks. But why? At what point did he become such a douchebag and what does that mean? There’s a lot to dive into there.”
In a separate interview with Variety, Gunn revealed:
“Through the story, you learn where Peacemaker came from. There’s a moment in [The Suicide Squad] where Bloodsport talks about his father and what his father was like, and you cut to a shot of Peacemaker, and Peacemaker nods. That’s the seed of the entire Peacemaker series…. [He’s] not an evil person, he’s just a bad guy. He seems sort of irredeemable in the film. But I think that there’s more to him. We didn’t get a chance to know him [in The Suicide Squad] in the way we get to know some of the other characters. And so that’s what the whole show is about. I needed eight episodes to do it, at least.”
