Viola Davis might star in a Peacemaker spin-off all about Amanda Waller
It looks like we're going to find out what happened to The Wall after the events of Peacemaker
Back in January, when Peacemaker fever was off the charts and the world was going crazy for John Cena’s lovable murder-doofus and his goofy friends, series creator and The Suicide Squad director James Gunn teased that he was working on a second spin-off show that would be “connected to [the Suicide Squad] universe” but not “the same genre as Peacemaker.” (In other words, not a comedy.)
That left the door open for a million different options (Weasel? A prequel about that dude Pete Davidson played? The return of Sean Gunn’s Calendar Man?), but now Deadline is saying that Warner Bros. and HBO Max are actually going with the most obvious answer—albeit one that is still a little surprising: Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller.
Waller’s role in DC Comics stories is usually to be the woman behind the scenes, pulling the strings of various players to suit her ostensibly heroic ends. That typically involves sending her personal assassin team, Task Force X (a.k.a. the Suicide Squad), to go kill people, so a solo show about her and not her pack of murderers isn’t necessarily the first thing you’d think of when you hear “James Gunn is making a spin-off of Peacemaker.”
That being said, Davis’ Waller—who appeared in both Suicide Squad movies—had her various schemes and manipulations revealed by her daughter (Danielle Brooks’ Leota Adebayo) at the end of Peacemaker’s first season, so this series could be about her suddenly finding herself on the ropes and without the resources of her elaborate spy network (let alone the Suicide Squad), which does sound like a good premise for a TV show. It’s almost like James Gunn knows what he’s doing and is good at planning out this sort of thing!
Neither HBO Max nor Warner Bros. have issued any kind of official response to this story, but Deadline seems confident in its sources, going so far as to say that Watchmen writer Christal Henry will be writing and executive producing the show. That seems to indicate that this is a real thing that’s (probably) happening and not just an idea floating around.