James Gunn Reveals PEACEMAKER Season 2 Was Originally Very Different Until SUPERMAN Changed Everything
Peacemaker Season 2 is going places no one expected, not even James Gunn. With the upcoming season diving deep into the emotional wreckage left in the wake of Superman, Gunn shared that his original plan for the series was drastically different. But once he finished writing Superman, everything changed.
The new season of Peacemaker picks up with John Cena’s Chris Smith still dealing with the fallout of his past. He’s trying to find some inner peace, but that’s not easy when Frank Grillo’s Rick Flag Sr. is gunning for revenge. His son, Rick Flag Jr., was killed by Peacemaker in The Suicide Squad, and now Flag Sr. is hunting down the man responsible, who also happens to be in possession of the Quantum Unfolding Chamber (QUC), a portal to another dimension once owned by his father, the White Dragon (Robert Patrick).
“I’m going to make a life in the other world,” Chris says in the trailer, which reveals glimpses of a strange alternate dimension where Peacemaker is seen as “a real hero.”
Meanwhile, Flag Sr. is pulling together a task force to shut down a dimensional rift, the same kind of rift that tore through Metropolis after the events of Superman.
But Peacemaker season 2 didn’t always look like this. Originally, Gunn had a very different story in mind. He shared:
“Originally, the first time I wrote a rough outline of season 2, a very rough outline, it had to do with other white supremacist superheroes who were after Peacemaker for killing his father because he was their comrade.
“For me, it actually played a little bit too much like season 1 and I think I wanted to turn the story on its heels a little bit more.”
Gunn didn’t want to retread familiar ground. Instead, he decided to dig into Chris’s internal struggle and guilt from everything that went down in Season 1.
“For season 2, I wanted Peacemaker to be this character who had to really deal with the ramifications of his actions in season 1, and deal with his emotional reality of the demons that he discovered.”
That means confronting not just the people he’s hurt, but also the trauma of his own past like accidentally killing his brother Keith when they were kids, and later killing his father.
In the new season, we’ll see an alternate reality where an adult Keith, played by David Denman, is still alive. That twist opens up an emotional arc that Gunn felt better served the character. Gunn added:
“How does he face [his demons]? And so this seemed to work much better for that.
The idea of incorporating an alternate dimension into Peacemaker didn’t solidify until after Gunn wrote Superman. That film cracked open the concept of another reality, giving Gunn a new angle to work from.
“Once I wrote Superman and started getting into Peacemaker, once I had the idea for the alternate dimension and how we were going to deal with that, I didn’t want to deal with it in a way that we’ve been seeing in comic book movies of the multiverse. It isn’t the multiverse.”
“This is more like a novel I really love: Philip Roth’s The Counterlife. It’s the idea of this one other life that’s very different from our life, and how you deal with this [alternate] version.
“Peacemaker sees this reality that’s like his — but better in seemingly every way — and so, how does he deal with that from an emotional standpoint? And how does he face those ghosts from his past, of the people that he loved and killed? That’s what he’s dealing with, emotionally.”
Season 2 is going to take fans on an intense and personal journey for Peacemaker, blending superhero action with surreal alternate-dimension drama. Gunn’s fresh direction promises something more emotional and introspective than what came before.
Source: Crew Call podcast