James Gunn has given The Suicide Squad fans excited about the spinoff series Peacemaker the bit of information they need to set aside their calendar for streaming the show as soon as it hits HBO Max later this week.
He revealed in a tweet Monday that the show will be making its way to the streaming platform at exactly 12:01 a.m. Pacific Standard Time Jan. 13, which means those on the East coast can expect it to be available at 3:01 a.m. Thursday.
The show will see the continued adventures of John Cena’s Peacemaker, a character who notoriously has no qualms about mowing down any man, woman, or child who gets in the way of his mission of achieving “peace.” Among the rogue’s gallery of anti-heroes at the center of DC’s The Suicide Squad, which was released earlier this year, Peacemaker proved to be of the particularly villainous variety in the film.
The lack of an arc for Cena’s character in The Suicide Squad — even as other Task Force X members made a change to give in to their more heroic impulses by the end of the film — is one of the reasons Gunn said he wanted a show centered around Peacemaker.
“I knew that there was a lot deeper to go with the character,” he explained in a recent interview.
In that same thread on Twitter, Gunn explained other tidbits about the show, including that its premiere on Thursday would feature its first three episodes, with each subsequent episode airing once per week after that. In terms of episode length, Gunn said, “Each episode is however long it needs to be to tell that story,” thanks to the flexibility of streaming, though it averages at about 45 minutes per episode.
Peacemaker comes to HBO Max on Jan. 13.