James Gunn holds the rare honor of writing and directing superhero productions for both Marvel and DC, so there’s hardly a better person to ask what it’s like to work with these two vastly different universes. Naturally, this topic often comes up when he’s being interviewed, and so was the case during a recent discussion about making Peacemaker.
To complement his mega-successful work on the Guardians of the Galaxy, Gunn jumped aboard the DC Universe train to work on the ragtag cast of characters that is The Suicide Squad, and now he’s making his showrunning debut with HBO Max’s Peacemaker. A show that, as confirmed by Gunn in a lengthy podcast session for The Hollywood Reporter's TV’s Top 5, came to be as part of the HBO Max’s need to produce new content for the platform, upon which Gunn never once doubted Peacemaker was the Task Force X member most deserving of his own spinoff.
When talking about what separates Marvel from DC, he did point out that “Marvel comic books were always a more one-connected series and DC always had more offshoots of things like Watchmen”, which is why it’s more natural for the current DC landscape to have properties Joker and Batman exist on their own. Despite that, he claims he was never asked by Marvel Studios to connect Guardians of the Galaxy with anything else in the MCU -save for Thanos-, which is a benefit he again enjoys when working on Peacemaker’s individual story.
Although the MCU several producers and directors from the new Disney Plus era have stated Marvel Studios need to include some characters and keep others off-limits, Gunn said he was allowed to use anybody, such as name-dropping Bat-Mite as a Peacemaker easter egg. Within that context, the writer and directors claims he started using Vigilante even before he knew the character had already showed up in the Arrow series, simply because he never saw it.
Gunn also mentioned the benefits of working with HBO, which allows him to conceive Peacemaker as a fully adult show with plenty of violence and swearing, instead of the family-friendly approach seen in Disney’s MCU, though that still makes it hard to navigate openly racist characters like Peacemaker’s father. However, in the end, it’s precisely the awkwardness in Peacemaker that caused Gunn to pursue more of the character because he “thought he said a lot about our times”.
Overall, Peacemaker is the manifestation of Gunn’s desire to explore more of the fringe and lesser-known characters since he’s “not interested in, you know, these icons, I'm interested in the guy that's jealous of the icons”, which is the same spirit that led to him working on Guardians of the Galaxy in the first place. If early Peacemaker reviews are to be trusted, it seems like Gunn may have struck gold twice.