Summer 2025 is shaping up to be a very exciting time for DC fans. Mere weeks after Superman lands in theaters and heralds the live-action debut of James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DCU, we’re getting another season of Peacemaker. John Cena is back in action as the gun-toting, peace-loving Christopher Smith, and he’s bringing much of the Season 1 cast along for the ride.
The first Peacemaker Season 2 trailer gives us a better idea of the plot this time around, as well as how exactly Season 2 connects back to the first season and Gunn’s The Suicide Squad. From the new reveals regarding the DCU timeline and Rick Flagg’s role as “villain” to a frustrating lack of Vigilante, let’s break down the key takeaways from the Peacemaker trailer.
Freddie Stroma’s Vigilante in Peacemaker Season 2
It would do a disservice to Cena’s Christopher Smith to call him the least interesting character in Peacemaker. He’s definitely a compelling figure in his own right. He’s a walking contradiction who preaches peace yet wages a bloody war. He’s also a classic Gunn-style goofball with a deeply buried heart of gold.
But as much as Peacemaker is ostensibly focused on its title character, this series truly is an ensemble project. The supporting cast is critical to the success of this formula, every bit as much as The CW’s The Flash series lived and died on the strength of its Team Flash dynamic. And out of every supporting character in this series, none stands out and steals the show quite as reliably as Freddie Stroma’s Vigilante.
Vigilante was the breakout character of Season 1. He was a hilarious foil to Cena’s Peacemaker – a clingy BFF who might make a great superhero if he weren’t also such a sad sack of a human being. The series doesn’t necessarily offer a very faithful adaptation of the character from the comics, but when he’s this entertaining, who cares?
That’s why it’s a bit disappointing not to see more of Stroma’s character in the trailer. Obviously, Cena was always going to hog the spotlight. We also get a lot of focus on Jennifer Holland’s Emilia Harcourt, who’s clearly dealing with some major rage issues. But Stroma’s Adrian Chase is relegated more to the background. We learn that he’s working at a fast food restaurant and struggling with the realization that saving the world doesn’t guarantee fame and public adoration. But we would have loved to see more of the character, and hopefully the trailer isn’t reflective of his role in the season as a whole.
Meeting the DCU Justice League
The trailer opens on a surprising note, as we see Peacemaker show up to an open interview with the Justice League. Sean Gunn’s Maxwell Lord, Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner, and Isabela Merced’s Hawkgirl are all present, and it’s clear they’ve written Peacemaker off before he even has a chance to plead his case.
In the process, we get a much better look at the Justice League group dynamic than the Superman trailer provides. This is clearly a very different Justice League from the one that briefly appeared in Season 1 (and we’ll get to the continuity shenanigans afoot a bit later). They’re a much more sardonic and irreverent bunch, which suits the Peacemaker setting a lot better than the stuffy DCEU Justice League ever could.
More than ever, it’s clear that Gunn is drawing heavily from DC’s beloved Justice League International comics for his version of the team. As in JLI, Lord is the team’s leader and financier. Also like those comics, the emphasis isn’t on bringing DC’s biggest and brightest heroes together in one room, but rather focusing on a more eclectic bunch of oddballs and misfits. These are heroes who actually need the legitimacy that serving in the Justice League provides.
Most likely, James Gunn filmed this scene while shooting Superman, making it easier to wrangle Sean Gunn, Fillion, and Merced together. We wouldn’t expect the team to play a major, recurring role in Peacemaker Season 2 beyond Chris’ failed tryout. But it is nice to get a closer look at the team and a sense of their dynamic.
Above all, it’s great to see how much humor and personality Merced is bringing to the Hawkgirl role. After suffering through the Arrowverse’s misguided take on the character (“I’m just a barista!!!”), it’s clear the DCU is going to deliver a far more enjoyable version of Hawkgirl. The new Justice League is shaping up nicely.
Accused of massacring innocent people, Smith was arrested and tried for war crimes. While serving his sentence, he agreed to join a secret Pentagon anti-terrorism program called Project: Peacemaker. The agents in the program trained on a high-tech military base but were never deployed, and Smith was eventually freed on his promised parole. The idea later inspired Smith to become a costumed crimefighter as a form of penance for the terrible crimes both he and his father committed.
Peacemaker has other high-tech gadgetry at his disposal, including a decked-out jet plane and a jetpack that grants him the ability to fly.
Peacemaker, the eight-episode HBO Max series, begins production in 2021. “Peacemaker will be live-action and action-packed. His shotgun will be single action. His favorite movie is Action Jackson,” Gunn teased on Twitter.
The Return of Frank Grillo’s Rick Flagg, Sr.
As of right now, Frank Grillo really is the glue holding the DCU together. His Rick Flagg, Sr. was a major player in the Creature Commandos animated series. We know that Grillo is making his live-action debut in the role in Superman. And now Flagg is being set up to play a major role in Peacemaker Season 2.
Flagg seems to be positioned as the main villain of Season 2, though maybe “villain” is a bit harsh, considering the character’s motivations. He’s a father mourning the murder of his son. He’s also now the duly appointed head of ARGUS, meaning he has both the legal jurisdiction and the moral high ground in his feud with Peacemaker.
This all sets the stage for what should be a fascinating dynamic in Season 2. As much as Chris wants to believe he’s a changed man and a legitimate hero, there’s no getting around what he did in 2021’s The Suicide Squad. He’s a man with some serious blood on his hands. Saving the world doesn’t absolve him of those sins. How much will viewers wind up rooting for Flagg to earn his revenge and take down Team Peacemaker? This should be a fun ride.
Making Sense of the DCU Timeline
On the Flagg front, isn’t it interesting how directly this season builds on The Suicide Squad? As much as the DCU is about wiping the slate clean and starting over with a fresh continuity, some elements of the previous DCEU remain in place. At this point, it seems like The Suicide Squad now stands as the unofficial first DCU movie. Too much of that film is being referenced in the DCU to simply write it off as a relic of a dead cinematic universe.
There’s a clear timeline for the DCU beginning to form now. The Suicide Squad kicked things off in 2021, followed by Peacemaker Season 1 in 2022. Then came Creature Commandos in 2024, the first official DCU project. Next up is Superman in July 2025, followed by Peacemaker Season 2 in August 2025. Then the DCU really starts to explode in all directions, with the arrival of shows like Lanterns and movies like Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow.
Gunn obviously doesn’t want to throw out any of the hard work he put into The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker Season 1, just because Warner Bros. is now drawing a hard line between what came before and what lies ahead. Who can blame him? And as Gunn told IGN in a recent interview, canon only matters so much. In the end, as much as these characters and stories matter, none of this is real.
“Hopefully there’s authenticity and truth to those stories because we care about those stories, the characters, the actors, the performers, the animators,” said Gunn. “They all care about these stories, but it’s not real.”
That being said, Gunn is well aware that he wrote himself into a corner by having the DCEU Justice League show up in Peacemaker Season 1. Somehow, Season 2 is going to deal with that loose thread.
“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,” he teased.
It’ll be interesting to see exactly how Season 2 works to resolve the Justice League of it all. It may have something to do with the scene late in the trailer where we see Chris venture into his father’s dimension and encounter another version of himself. The multiverse is now in play, so anything is possible, and everything can be explained away.
In any case, apart from that Justice League cameo, there’s very little preventing Gunn from simply breaking The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker Season 1 off of the old DCEU and officially making them part of the DCU. The Suicide Squad is already such a standalone project, with only a few characters/actors tying it back to the larger DCEU. And that allows Gunn the opportunity to keep Margot Robbie in the Harley Quinn role, just as we’ve seen Cena’s Peacemaker and Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller carry over into the new canon. There’s no sense in throwing the baby out with the bathwater by recasting Harley when Robbie’s version has been pretty widely embraced. Joker, though? He’s a different story.
Ultimately, we suspect the question of exactly what’s canon and what isn’t in the DCU will be a lot clearer by the time Peacemaker Season 2 wraps up. We’re looking forward to the series making its long-awaited return. Just don’t skimp on Vigilante, please.
For more on the future of the DCU, see what to expect from DC in 2025 and brush up on every DC movie and series in development.
Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on BlueSky.
