John Cena’s “Peacemaker” TV series at HBO Max has a premiere date. The “Suicide Squad” spinoff will debut on January 13, 2022.
The announcement was made during the second annual DC Fandome online event on Saturday. Along with the premiere date, HBO Max unveiled the first trailer for the series, which you can watch above.
“Peacemaker” will follow Cena’s Christopher Smith aka Peacemaker, who was part of the expansive cast for James Gunn’s quasi-reboot of “The Suicide Squad,” which was released in August. The HBO Max series will explore Peacemaker’s origins and “extend the world that Gunn is creating.” It will pick up directly after the events of the movie, which saw Peacemaker laid up in a hospital bed after he apparently died from a gunshot wound.
Steve Agee and Jennifer Holland also return from “The Suicide Squad” as John Econmos and Emilia Harcourt. Additionally, “Peacemaker” stars Danielle Brooks, Robert Patrick, Freddie Stroma and Chukwudi Iwuji. Stroma plays DC Comics character Adrian Chase aka Vigilante.
Gunn wrote all eight episodes of the series and directed five of them. He and “The Suicide Squad” producer Peter Safran will executive produce “Peacemaker.” Cena will co-executive produce the show, which hails from Gunn’s Troll Court Entertainment and The Safran Company in association with Warner Bros. Television.
Cena’s Peacemaker is described as as a man who believes in peace “at any cost — no matter how many people he has to kill to get it.”
Gunn described his reasoning for spinning off Peacemaker into his own TV show, which is part of a greater emphasis among DC and Warner Bros. brass to extend their movie franchises into streaming.
“I was not planning to do it at all,” Gunn said last month. “It was Peter Safran who came to me and Walter Hamada from DC, and they were like, hey, if you could do a TV show on any one of the characters from the ‘Suicide Squad,’ who would you do? And I just found something really interesting about Peacemaker, both because I loved working with John Cena, and I thought that he had a lot of acting gifts and comedy gifts that we weren’t able to fully utilize in the movie. I thought he was just a really cool, interesting character that could be pertinent to today and today’s world, in terms of his sort of backwards way of looking at things and a lot of the show is about his friendship with these other characters, especially Danielle [Brook]’s character Leota, and their friendship that emerges out of all this, even though they very much represented very different parts of America today.”