Can John Cena's Peacemaker Find Redemption in THE SUICIDE SQUAD Spinoff Series? James Gunn Weighs In

I’ll be honest, while Peacemaker was a fun character in The Suicide Squad, I really didn’t end up liking him by the end of the movie. The guy was a complete asshole, and in my mind he did some pretty unforgivable things. Well, the character is getting his own spinoff series, and I’ve been wondering how that will fly in the upcoming series. Will James Gunn attempt to redeem a character that seems unredeemable?

During a recent interview with THR, Gunn weighed in on this question and he explains that there still is room for growth for Peacemaker. He explained:

"At the end of The Suicide Squad, [Idris Elba's] Bloodsport learns a lot. He's a better person than he was at the beginning. A lot of the characters are much better than they were at the beginning, and Peacemaker has a lot to learn. It's that ability to learn that for me makes him a little bit more likable. His blind spots in some places are pretty terrible, and in some places are him being ignorant. I think that's an important distinction to make as well. He is open at the same time, sometimes."

From what I saw in The Suicide Squad, Peacemaker didn’t really seem to be that open to learning. But maybe when the spinoff series picks up he ends up feeling bad for what he did to the Suicide Squad team in the first movie, and I can’t imagine the ones that survived forgiving him. But, we’ll see how this all plays out!

One thing that Gunn likes to do is take broken, flawed, and unlikeable characters and give them strong story arcs of growth that the fans love. It’ll be interesting to see how he does that with Peacemaker.

Peacemaker is described as being an action-adventure comedy, and it will “explore the origins of Peacemaker, a man who believes in peace at any cost, no matter how many people he has to kill to get it.”

Gunn wrote the Peacemaker series, and he directed five episodes. The series stars John Cena as Peacemaker, Steve Agee as Economos, Jennifer Holland as Harcourt, Chukwudi Iwuji as Murn, Danielle Brooks as Adebayo, and Freddie Stroma as Vigilante.

Peacemaker is coming to HBO Max in January 2022.