Thursday saw the three-episode premiere of DC’s Peacemaker, the first live-action series to spin out of the events of the DC Extended Universe. Set after the events of The Suicide Squad, the show chronicles a new status quo for Christopher Smith / Peacemaker (John Cena) in the weirdest, rowdiest way it could. Critics have already responded kindly to the show in the lead-up to its release, and now it just got a significant honor from the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. Peacemaker is now “Certified Fresh” on the platform with a 93% positive ranking out of 40 reviews. This score is actually three points higher than what The Suicide Squad was certified fresh at when it was released in August of 2021.
“I didn’t go out to say I wanted to tell the story about toxic masculinity, just like I didn’t do that in my other movies,” series creator James Gunn recently explained to ComicBook.com. “Well, a little bit moreso in The Suicide Squad, actually. That was sort of in the forefront of my brain. I mean, at the end of the movie, you see the character that’s the masculine character save the day by becoming completely vulnerable with Ratcatcher. So it’s always a part of the stuff I do.”
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“I think that for me, really, it was about Peacemaker’s political belief system, and some of the masculinity issues are part and parcel with that,” Gunn continued. “It was about having somebody like Peacemaker, who has this umbrella of beliefs over him and believes everything he reads on the internet. And then having Leota Adebayo, played by Danielle Brooks, who has a completely different way of looking at the world. Yet, somehow, they find something in each other that is common — and actually, they really love each other. That relationship, to me, is the central love story. It’s not romantic. It’s not sexual. It’s just about two people who can see beyond the exterior of what people are, to who they really are as human beings. It is that understanding, and that compassion, that I think allows for change in this world, and I think that it’s something that is not given out very easily. We aren’t very generous, especially on social media. And generosity is something that we could all use a little bit more of, including me.”
Peacemaker will star Cena, Danielle Brooks as Leota Adebayo, Robert Patrick as Auggie Smith, Jennifer Holland as Emilia Harcourt, Steve Agee as John Economos, Freddie Stroma as Vigilante, Christopher Heyerdahl as Captain Locke, Chukwudi Iwuji as Clemson Murn, Lochlyn Munro as Larry Fitzgibbon, Annie Chang as Sophie Song, Elizabeth Faith Ludlow as Keeya, and Rizwan Manji as Jamil.
New episodes of Peacemaker debut on Thursdays exclusively on HBO Max.
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