James Gunn would love to "Lucas the shit out of" Peacemaker season one

Peacemaker's new season opens with retcons to bring the show into the new DCU—but Gunn says he just doesn't have the money right now to retrofit season one.

By William Hughes | August 23, 2025 | 4:03pm

Left: A scene from Peacemaker's first season (Screenshot: HBO Max). Right: The same scene from a Previously On segment of Peacemaker season 2.

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There’s an odd little moment that pops up in the second-season premiere of James Gunn’s Peacemaker—before the show proper even starts, in fact. In a very deliberately titled “Previously on the DCU” recap to the episode, Gunn presents altered versions of several scenes from the first season of the show, culminating in a very different version of a sequence from the end of the show’s first season, which originally showed the Justice League showing up (way too late) to a very bloody alien emergency. (Including actual cameos from Jason Momoa and Ezra Miller, with Aquaman telling the Flash “Fuck you, Barry” after the speedster cracks a joke about his fellow League member having a very, uh, The Boys-esque relationship with fish.) That may have been all well and good for the DCEU, but Gunn’s new DCU changes things up: The “previously” sequence now shows the silhouettes of Superman‘s Justice Gang (including Superman and Supergirl), and shows cutaways to Nathan Fillion’s Green Lantern and Isabella Merced’s Hawkgirl (who appear later in the episode) instead of the now-excised heroes.

You’d be forgiven for wondering whether Gunn, clearly in a retconning mood, might have gone a little further, and used his powers as co-head of DC Studios to go back and actually change the episode in question, bringing it into compliance with the new canon. He hasn’t, turns out—but he might be tempted to one of these days.

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This is per an interview that Gunn gave to TV Insider this week, which started with him admitting he just doesn’t have the money to throw at that level of self-indulgent rewriting of reality at the moment. “I’d rather give that money to a few more CGI shots of superheroes.” (As Jerrod Jones notes in his review of “The Ties That Grind,” the recap functions perfectly well as a “Just be cool about this” lampshade, acknowledging the changes without making big deals out of them.) Still, there is clearly a part of Gunn’s brain that would love to tinker with the show’s first season to bring it in line with his new DCU canon (all of which, it’s worth noting, he himself has directed, from Creature Commandos, to Superman, to now this new season of Peacemaker.) “At some point, I would love to Lucas the shit out of it,” Gunn says, only half-sounding like he’s joking about going all Star Wars Special Editions on his TV baby. “But right now, I don’t have the money.”