Birds of Prey sets up the relationship between Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy for future movies in the DC Extended Universe. Harley Quinn is best known as the Joker’s girlfriend, but the romance between the two really shouldn’t be seen as #RelationshipGoals. As Birds of Prey shows in its opening introduction, Joker is pretty horrible to Harley.

To fans of Harley Quinn, though, the Joker is part of her origin story - and not her one true love at all. No, anyone who’s familiar with the comics will be well aware of the relationship between Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy. The two formed a partnership in the classic Batman: The Animated Series when Harley was thrown out by the Joker, and it didn’t take long for the comics to follow suit and team the two characters together. It wasn’t until 2009’s Gotham City Sirens that Harley and Ivy began to become more than just friends, with Harley admitting she knew Ivy had fallen in love with her. They became girlfriends, although without what they considered to be the jealousy of monogamy.

Birds of Prey subtly sets up a romance plot between Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy - but it promises to be very different to either the comics or Batman: The Animated Series. In one early scene, Harley presents her backstory to moviegoers and recounts having her heart broken three times before she ever met the Joker. Most viewers will notice she runs through two guys and a girl, confirming the DCEU’s Harley Quinn is bisexual. But the animation style of that brief shot is important, because the girl is identical to the Poison Ivy of Batman: The Animated Series. The clear implication is that, in the DCEU, Harley and Ivy got together long before either became a supervillain - but they broke up.

It’s clear setup for a reunion, especially with a Gotham City Sirens film hopefully still on the horizon. That movie is, after all, named after the comic book where Harley and Ivy first began to admit their feelings for one another. In the comics Harley was the more reluctant of the two, initially using Ivy’s feeling as a way to distract her and take her down. It will be fascinating to see how the big screen romance differs to Harley and Ivy’s history in the comics.

Interestingly, Birds of Prey sets up another plot for Poison Ivy as well. One subplot sees Renee Montoya suspended from the police force by a dirty cop named Tim Munroe, played by Derek Wilson. In the comics, Munroe and his partner were downright corrupt, and they were responsible for killing an orphan Poison Ivy had sworn to protect. Needless to say, Harley Quinn got payback, and soon Munroe was plant-food. It’s possible that arc could actually be developed in Gotham City Sirens, giving Ivy her own narrative.

More: How Birds of Prey Sets Up The Suicide Squad

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