James Gunn: Peacemaker Season 2 'Revolves Around' This Major Superman Movie Element
The following contains spoilers from James Gunn's Superman movie, now in theaters.
A significant plot element from James Gunn's Superman film will factor into Peacemaker Season 2.
Vice versa, actually.
You may recall that Season 1 of the HBO Max series established that the titular Chris Smith's (John Cena) father Auggie (Robert Patrick) had inside his modest home a door that, using a keypad lock, opened into an incredibly/impossibly vast space dubbed the Quantum Unfolding Storage Area/Chamber.
Auggie used this XXXL area — a pocket universe, if you will — to store his White Dragon gear as well as son Chris' Peacemaker helmets. But in Season 2, it takes on greater significance.
As teased in the stinger of the first trailer, Chris, once again in tighty-whiteys, opens a second door within the Quantum Unfolding Chamber and runs into... his doppelgänger.
In Gunn's Superman film, supervillain Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) uses a pocket universe that he created to, among other things, host a black site prison. The concept there, Gunn says, is similar to Peacemaker's QUC, minus some big bugs.
"What the whole season of Peacemaker revolves around" is the idea a pocket universe, Gunn says in EW.com's Superman post mortem.
"The one in Peacemaker works better," Gunn notes. "Lex's version is much jankier."
Gunn says that, as suggested by Peacemaker's doppelgänger in the trailer, the Quantum Unfolding Chamber allows for multiverse-type twists, though on the DC TV series they're handled "in a much different way" than we've seen in superhero fare over recent years.
"I think of Peacemaker as more of a high-concept story about one other world," he explains. "It's more akin to Philip Roth's [1996 novel] The Counterlife than it is to the third Spider-Man movie [2021's No Way Home]... I love that movie, but it isn't about that. It isn't Deadpool & Wolverine. It's really a very simple, simple story about [Chris Smith's] relationship to this one other world."
Gunn makes clear that this "pocket universe" DNA shared by Superman and Peacemaker Season 2 did not dictate John Cena's brief cameo in the big-screen launch of the new DCU.
"He would've been in there no matter what," asserts the filmmaker. "I like the idea that he's going on this incendiary talk show, and he's one of these a–holes that would be on that show."
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