Ever since the Suicide Squad came crashing into theaters back in 2016, Warner Bros. has been doing whatever it can to keep them around in the public eye. Games, animated movies, popping up in other characters’ shows: the DC antiheroes are going to feature in whatever they can. Their next onscreen venture is Suicide Squad Isekai, which also has the added bonus of being the team’s first anime project.
Like other isekai stories, the upcoming series takes the black ops team—Harley Quinn, Peacemaker, Clayface, Deadshot, and King Shark—into a fantasy world with all sorts of weird stuff going down. With a three-day time limit before their heads explode, it’s on the Squad to figure out what’s going on, how to get home, and kill plenty of fantasy creatures while doing it. That sounds like a potentially fun romp for the Squad to go through, particularly with other DC characters on hand like Katana, Killer Croc, and the Joker. Despite that, the show’s opening might have you think you’re in for a bit of a different show.
That’s not to say it’s a bad opening, it’s a fairly good one: WIT Studio (best known for Spy x Family and Ranking of Kings) really captured the look of everyone here, and Tomoyasu Hotei’s “Another World” is a nice, energetic opening song. It just doesn’t gel entirely with how the show’s been marketed thus far, to say nothing of the larger Suicide Squad brand: bloody, sometimes quippy chaos has kind of become the team’s default, as we’ve seen in the 2021 film or the game from this past February. This gives the show a different, almost slow burn vibe, albeit one that looks pretty striking regardless.
Suicide Squad Isekai premieres June 27 with its first three episodes on Max and Hulu.
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