Peacemaker: Season 2: How James Gunn’s DCU Addresses That Season 1 Justice League Cameo

Spoilers ahead for the Season 2 premiere of Peacemaker!

DC Studios co-president James Gunn has often said the DCU canon begins with Creature Commandos, Superman, and Peacemaker: Season 2, but that elements of his film The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker: Season 1 will also be canon going forward.

“The truth is almost all of Peacemaker is canon with the exception of Justice League… which we will kind of deal with in the next season of Peacemaker,” Gunn exclusively told IGN last year. “Now in Creature Commandos, you’ll hear them talk about things that happened in [The] Suicide Squad or Peacemaker. … Well then, those things automatically become canon.”

So how exactly does Peacemaker: Season 2 address that DCEU Justice League cameo in the final episode of Peacemaker: Season 1? Is there some huge multiverse realignment given that Season 2’s storyline involves a parallel dimension? Nope.

Peacemaker’s Justice League Cameo Changed for Season 2

Peacemaker: Season 2 begins with a sequence aptly titled “Previously in the DCU,” where key moments from Season 1 are recapped to catch viewers up to speed on the saga of Chris Smith (John Cena), his backstory, and how he came to work for the secret government organization A.R.G.U.S.

When, in Season 1, Adebayo (Danielle Brooks) made a call to see if the Justice League can come help them in their mission to thwart an alien invasion, her line has been redubbed to say “the Justice Gang” instead. This is followed by a scene of Chris telling Harcourt (Jennifer Holland) that he once puked all over Green Lantern, a character who was not in the DCEU.

The Justice League’s cameo in the Peacemaker: Season 1 finale has been reshot for the recap to feature the Justice Gang, who made their debut in Gunn’s Superman. (Gunn has said Peacemaker: Season 2 begins about a month after the events depicted in Superman.)

We see Guy Gardner’s Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), and, glimpsed in silhouette, Mister Terrific, Superman and Supergirl. “You’re late, you fuckin’ dickheads!,” Chris shouts at them as he did to the Justice League in the original version.

The nasty rumor about Jason Momoa’s Aquaman and banter with Ezra Miller’s Flash has been replaced by an exchange between Guy and Hawkgirl. After Hawkgirl refers to Peacemaker as a “meathead,” Guy replies, “Screw that guy. You know he tells people I’m a puke freak?”

James Gunn: Stop Stressing About Canon

Gunn’s resolution to the Justice League cameo is handled so quickly and simply that some fans might applaud it for just wiping the slate clean from the get-go, while others might feel like they’ve been gaslit. In a virtual roundtable discussion this week with media outlets, including IGN, Gunn said a more convoluted sci-fi fix to the canon predicament was “not really” in the cards.

“Was there ever a thought of it? Not really. I mean, could I make it so that Peacemaker is the DCEU Peacemaker, even though he’s not really the DCEU Peacemaker and he walks through that portal and that’s where the DCEU Peacemaker is? I could have, but people are like, ‘How are normies going to understand it?’ And no, the answer is, normies don’t give a shit. Normies don’t care about all this canon stuff so intimately.”

Gunn added, “It doesn’t matter if it’s not completely consistent in the past. So I thought the simple way was really the best, which is just saying, yeah, this world is a little different. We know there’s universes, and this is the universe in which everything was exactly the same as Season 1, except for the Justice League.”

This isn’t the first time Gunn has cautioned fans not to take canon so seriously. “One of the weird things to me is none of this is real. It may be alarming to people, but none of it is real,” Gunn told IGN last year. “It’s all just stories that we’re telling about characters.”

Will Peacemaker’s Justice League Cameo Still Be Available on HBO Max?

While the Justice League cameo may not be DCU canon, the original ending of Peacemaker: Season 1 will remain the way it is on HBO Max. The Justice Gang version of the scene will just be part of the Season 2 opener. Not that Gunn wouldn’t mind making that change if he could.

“I wish I could do that. I wish I could Lucas the shit out of this, but I can’t because it’s too expensive,” Gunn quipped at the aforementioned press roundtable. “And I think we’d rather spend the money on a few more Supergirl VFX shots.”

That’s not to say that Gunn regrets the Justice League cameo. Indeed, as the filmmaker told us this week, he was “excited” at the time awaiting people’s reaction to it.

“Two things that I was so excited for people to see [in Season 1] was the dance sequence that they didn’t know was coming until it showed up after the cold open in Episode 1, and then the ending with the Justice League. I just knew that people would flip out over that. And here’s this little punk, Peacemaker, telling the Justice League to piss off. And I thought that was so fun and crazy and such a big idea.”

But now the DCU has arrived and the Justice Gang are the costumed team protecting this reality. Beyond their “Previously in the DCU” cameo, the Justice Gang will also, as revealed in the trailer, reappear when Peacemaker endures a humiliating job interview hoping to join their ranks.

Whether the Justice Gang makes any additional appearances this season beyond those two remains to be seen, but Gunn has revealed there’s a major DCU cameo coming in the later episodes of Season 2.

What did you think of how James Gunn retconned the Justice League out of the DCU? Sound off in the comments.

For more DCU coverage, read our Peacemaker: Season 2 premiere review, find out why John Cena thinks Peacemaker hates Superman a little less now, and learn how Peacemaker: Season 2 offers clues about whose story the DCU is actually about.