James Gunn’s ‘Peacemaker’ Ran so ‘Superman’ Could Fly

James Gunn is 58 years old, a born nerd from the midwest whose early and presiding loves were zombie films and horror manga and comic books. His rise tracks fairly neatly with the ascent of the nerd and its iron grip on the internet and popular culture. He got his first gig when he was still a Columbia graduate student at Troma, the infamous indie B-movie grindhouse, where he wrote and produced, and from there broke into Hollywood as a screenwriter, an endlessly prolific and restless creator reimagining timeless American IP like Dawn of the Dead and Scooby-Doo. He then cut his directorial teeth on small, ambitious projects that were gross and funny and always smarter than they needed to be. 

Gunn’s second produced screenplay is a no-budget superhero satire called The Specials, and in 2010 he directed Super, a Rainn Wilson vehicle that placed a disturbed schmuck in a vigilante scenario. Neither film performed well, though Super has become a cult object in certain dark film bro corners. What these efforts have in common is that they’re forward-thinking spoofs, neo-superhero films poking at their medium’s storytelling tropes and conventions before the modern age of superhero films had even begun. Gunn proved himself to be a subcultural translator, a writer and filmmaker who knows his subject intimately and is talented enough to convey his subversion even if you’re unfamiliar with the matter he’s ratfucking. 

This is why, in retrospect, it was a stroke of genius for Kevin Feige to tap Joss Whedon’s small-market friend and give him the keys to Guardians of the Galaxy. Gunn can be credited as the filmmaker who breathed new life and possibilities into the mega serial. It’s the first Marvel film made entirely outside the Avengers core, which plants the seeds for the eventual end game of these early phases. It literally opens the world by taking Marvel to space, and expands the possibilities of what a Marvel movie is and what it can be in its humor, tone, and soundtrack. The film, considered a palate-cleansing, fun Avengers exhale prior to release, became a critical and commercial hit.

Gunn proved to be the perfect guy to grow a cinematic universe because, while the core tenets of superhero cinema were once built on existing relationships with Spider-Man, Wolverine, or Batman, his specialty is the inevitable mining of comic universe archives, then introducing and endearing the audience to lesser-known characters from the lost, acid-brained corners of comic galaxies. He gets the weirdness of his ephemeral heroes, and he leans in, takes them seriously, and forces you to as well. He uses their status as outcasts and misfits as connective tissue to bond them with, at times, sentimentality and shmaltz that strike his critics as a treacly turnoff. But to his fans, he’s a writer who excels with characters and relationships, and has a talent for coloring outside the lines while staying on the page that a franchise steward in a big studio system needs to thrive and make something good under rigorous universal strictures. 

It’s possible the tweets that had the most impact on the present and near commercial future of blockbuster filmmaking were authored by Gunn between 2009 and 2011, long before he directed a near-billion-dollar-grossing film. The tweets were crass, dumb, and unfunny, about pedophilia and rape and homophobia, among other subjects, solely to elicit juvenile laughs from dickheads that called back to Gunn’s Troma roots and persona as an active online brovocateur. In 2018, the tweets were resurfaced, and Gunn was deposed from the Guardians franchise. Due to the vocal lobbying from the stars of that franchise, Gunn would be hired back less than a year later to finish his Marvel trilogy. But during his brief stay in the Phantom Zone, he was contracted by DC to make a sequel to David Ayer’s The Suicide Squad two years after the first installment, which becomes a hard reset. 

The resulting film, about a group of losers thrown into a sci-fi, postmodern Brian G. Hutton war flick, is very close to the best thing that’s come out of the last decade or so of DC, with the possible exception of Patty Jenkins’ original Wonder Woman (and, subsequently, the charming Blue Beetle). It’s R-rated to Ayer’s original PG-13 and, most important, a clear delineation from Zach Snyder’s (whose best film was made with Gunn’s Dawn of the Dead screenplay) bleak, Nolan-derivative, every-superhero-is-a-Greek-god/Christ-figure approach to marshalling the Justice League stable of heroes.

Gunn eventually finds his footing in DC, and proves his facility for storytelling in this world is not “just” confined to The Guardians of the Galaxy—and, critically for an executive creative officer in this age of content, not just to the movies as a format—with Peacemaker, which debuted in 2022. It is a classic, pure Gunn proposition. In his Suicide Squad, he liked the idea that the moral lines were ambivalent, and some members of the squad could break bad. John Cena’s character, Peacemaker, was that one, the figure who will not go along with the crew when they decide to disobey their orders and do the right thing. He licks boot and murders Joel Kinnaman’s Rick Flag out of a misguided sense of duty to Viola Davis’ fascistic operations director, Amanda Waller. Most every other character in the film has some kind of a redemptive arc. Peacemaker does not.

 “Peacemaker is a douche and he stays a douche,” Gunn said. “But I think there's something below that. This guy is a loud, obnoxious, bro-ey douchebag. That sucks. But why? At what point did he become such a douchebag, and what does that mean?” When we meet Peacemaker, he’s still a jingoistic monster with faulty code. “I cherish peace with all of my heart. I don't care how many men, women and children I need to kill to get it,” he says early in the series, but he’s beginning to see the cracks in this logic.

Cena’s titular character is Christopher Smith, a profane, crass, slow-witted, soulful dumbass working on introspection, a manipulated puppet hitman who wants to be a Good Guy and a good guy but first has to shake free of his traumatic childhood programming administered by his maniac, white supremacist, fundamentalist Christian father, who moonlit as supervillain. You could think of it as a red-state zombie trying to locate his humanity. “He’s every guy I grew up with in Missouri, and not different from anyone I know,” Gunn has said. And in the wrestler John Cena’s stunningly capable hands, the character is something like a blend of Chris Pratt’s Peter Quill and Dave Bautista’s Drax the Destroyer in The Guardians of the Galaxy. He wears a red, blue, and khaki costume with a dove of peace emblem on the chest that looks like he bought it at a Spirit Halloween and barely contains Cena’s cartoonish proportions. He wields a gun with an insanely long barrel and a series of silver-domed viking helmets that bestow him with superheroic powers like “Anti-Gravity” and “Sonic Boom.” He has the mandatory Gunn-property animal sidekick, a bald eagle named “Eagly.” 

Gunn wrote every episode of Peacemaker and directed five of eight. In the extended-canon, comic streaming miniseries like this one, which really came of age in the last five years, could be characterized as a mixed bag if you’re feeling generous, with most serving as disposable wastes of time. But Peacemaker season one is a fully fleshed-out story that could have ended with its finale (but will return with its second season in August) and is filled with fun, imaginative set pieces and fight sequences that are accomplished in how unpolished, physical, and messy they are, devoid of the dueling-laser-beam final-boss showdowns. It’s very much the product of Gunn’s juvenile taste, often covered in splattered blood and viscera. 

The story is not adapted from any comic property but wholly conceived by Gunn, a body-snatcher plot about an alien race of insects called Butterflies, parasites that have the ability to enter humans through their mouths and possess them. They have come to Earth because it is habitable to their race; their world has been depleted, so they seek to take over ours. Peacemaker was and still is an asset for a deep-state operation called Task Force X that employs violent criminals to carry out black ops, and has been assigned a mission to smoke out and destroy the Butterflies. 

So it’s familiar beats, but the show is infused with all the Gunn signatures: He mines the reliable grist of parental issues, the team of losers and broken toys; the show is populated by sporadic slow-motion splash-page struts towards the camera while a sick tune blares (for this series, Gunn goes with a hair metal/’80s bar rock and more recent metal made in that spirit); there is, of course, an enormous, disgusting monster; we are confronted with a lot of hugging and learning. With the elongated format of a series, Gunn proved he’s as adept at managing C and D plots, and uses his extra time to deliver quiet character-building moments even a bloated Marvel film wouldn’t afford him. He’s consistently able to derive an emotion from shit like a dying CGI alien bug that looks like cake frosting. It’s the work of a storyteller ready to stretch his legs.

Peacemaker resolves with such perfect symmetry that you have to respect Gunn’s writing for its meticulous craftsmanship, even if you don’t like the garish vessel containing it. Smith has an opportunity to achieve the lasting peace he claims to grave, but chooses not to. Not necessarily because he has given up on his “proto-fascist libertarian idea of freedom,” but because he’s made his decision out of simple loyalty to his friends, who he knew wouldn’t approve—the conclusion makes it clear that peace at any cost is just tyranny. It’s diamond-cut, earned logic built through character. Gunn has referred to screenwriting as a right-brain activity, and refers to himself as a practical writer, and it’s a reminder that that’s his true superpower.

The actual last scene of the season is Peacemaker slow-marching past the Justice League, who have arrived a beat late to save the day. As this obscure character from the DC archives brushes past the iconic heroes from this comic universe Warner has never fully figured out what to do with, you feel Gunn passing the baton to himself. Several months after Peacemaker’s first season, this is precisely what came to pass, with Gunn placed in charge of the creative direction of DC while his producing partner on The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker, Peter Safran, handles the executive shit for DC/Warner.

Since then, Gunn has teased out a lengthy, ambitious slate of films and streamers dotting the calendar over the next several years, including some obvious relaunches of mishandled IP but plenty of weirdos and bad guys and curios getting feature treatment, among them the recent animated The Creature Commandos, another crude, loud, ugly proposition of an Adult Swim-level animated DC property that also contains more thought, soul,l and wit than most Marvel streamers combined. 

The slate will demand manic output from Gunn, which is just how he likes things, and I know this because he’s been posting constantly through it, oversharing in his workflow and behind-the-scenes thought process and being annoying—promising, above all else, that the future for DC will be goofy as hell.