Warner Bros., is a movie studio.
Warner Bros. went out of its way to make sure that The Suicide Squad wasn't seen as a sequel to Suicide Squad even though that's what it was. The studio is taking a different approach to addressing the connections between its cinematic universe and the new Peacemaker spinoff series.
It is commonplace for spinoff superhero series to dance around the details of how they fit into the larger picture until about halfway through the season. These shows are usually set after the events of the features that preceded them, but they feel as if you are only meant to think about those details to a point and in the abstract until they can conveniently be pulled into the foreground mid-season. The reason for this is that studios want their tie-in shows to feel like stories that can stand on their own and not scare people off if they haven't seen every single project within a franchise. This approach to worldbuilding often comes at the cost of shows seeming out of place and time or as if they don't know how to acknowledge significant events that their characters should be talking about.
The first episode of Peacemaker establishes its connections to The Suicide Squad with a level of straightforwardness that is refreshing and something that more of these shows might want to consider. Before Peacemaker gets going, it opens with a full-on recap of The Suicide Squad, which takes just over a minute to finish, and gives you a good idea of what to expect from the film.
It is not obvious from the recap which of the narrative threads Peacemaker intends to pick up. What is clear is how Peacemaker's time working forAmanda Waller has impacted his future. If The Suicide Squad had not aired on Max last summer, Warner Bros. would have been more comfortable giving it the previously on treatment. The day and date of Warner Bros. films on streaming services raised eyebrows and concerns last year, as directors and cinema nerds worried about what that strategy might portend for the future of the industry. The implication that any movie to premiere on a streaming platform was being made less than just by existing alongside content originally created to live on those services was mixed in with concerns about how streaming might hurt theaters.
It can work against studios' interests when their interconnected franchises grow to be as big as the ones that Warner Bros. and Marvel have built out, because studios have a financial motivation to put their features up on pedestals that way. Warner is in a somewhat different position because it hasn't yet had a massive event like the one that happened with the movie Peacemaker, but it still feels organic and interesting.
The handshake between The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker might not be a success, but it is the kind of move the studio might want to consider more in the future.
Every Thursday, new episodes of Peacemaker are available on the streaming service.
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