Task Force X have faced a rocky road so far in the DCEU, with David Ayer’s Suicide Squad making a lot of money but finding itself panned by critics after Warner Bros. drastically altered the filmmaker’s original vision in post-production, while James Gunn’s hybrid of sequel and reboot scored some of the best reviews in the franchise’s history, but flopped hard at the box office.
John Cena will continue flying the flag when Peacemaker comes to HBO Max in January of next year, and Gunn has already called the show a spiritual successor to The Suicide Squad. A third installment may yet happen, but we’re hearing from our sources – the same ones who told us Ben Affleck was returning as Batman in The Flash long before it was confirmed – that the series could end up planting the seeds for a Secret Six spinoff.
The supervillain team has had several iterations in the comic books since first being introduced in 1968, but the setup has largely remained the same; a shadowy figure known only as Mockingbird approaches a sextet of disparate figures to pull off a covert mission, and they get to work.
While that does sound awfully similar to the Suicide Squad, some notable names to have been part of the Secret Six over the decades are Deadshot, Harley Quinn, Bane, King Shark and Catwoman, so in execution it would easily be able to differentiate itself from Amanda Waller’s crew of expendable inmates. CBS once had plans for Secret Six TV show, but it never got any further than the announcement, so maybe HBO Max’s expanding DCEU slate will be the perfect platform to make it a reality.
