The Marvel Star James Gunn Wanted To Include In The Peacemaker Finale (Exclusive)

3 days ago 8

John Cena in costume from season one of Peacemaker

Sean O’Connell is a globally recognized film journalist and author who has been covering Hollywood since 1999. His byline has appeared in USA Today, The Washington Post, CinemaBlend, and Fandango, to name a few. He is a longstanding member of the Critics Choice Association, and has served on the organization's Board of Directors since 2018. For years, Sean traveled the world co-hosting the industry-respected film podcast ReelBlend with fellow Critics Choice Association members Jake Hamilton and Kevin McCarthy. The pod became a favorite interview stop for prestigious filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, Sir Ridley Scott, Greta Gerwig, The Russo Brothers, Zack Snyder, and Tom Hanks. A rabid comic book geek, Sean has published three nonfiction books that delve deep into the entertainment industry: Release the Snyder Cut, detailing the controversial saga of Zack Snyder’s Justice League; With Great Power, an in-depth retelling of Spider-Man’s history in Hollywood, and; Bruce Willis: Celebrating The Cinematic Legacy Of An Unbreakable Hollywood Icon.

One day, in the not so distant future, Marvel Studios and DC Films will figure out a way to crossover properties, putting the competing comic book characters in the same project. It’s happening in the comics, it’ll inevitably happen in the movies. But that day is not today… no matter how hard James Gunn wanted it to be the case.

This week, Gunn dropped the season finale of Peacemaker, and in the process established the doorway to a new planet that will be very important to the DCU moving forward. There is plenty of information on that big DCU reveal on CBR, if you have managed to watch the Peacemaker finale when it landed on HBO Max.

But during an exclusive interview with CBR, Gunn revealed another fun little Easter Egg he almost worked into the finale.

Talk About Breaking The Fourth Wall

Ryan Reynolds as Wade Wilson with Dogpool from Deadpool and Wolverine

Everyone reading this knows that James Gunn started at Marvel with the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise before switching gears and taking over DC Films for Warner Bros. Gunn’s a fan of both worlds, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he is the director at the helm of the eventual Marvel-DC crossover event, if and when it happens.

But Gunn told CBR in a post-finale conversation that he tried to get a Marvel character into the last episode of Peacemaker Season 2, specifically in the moment where the A.R.G.U.S. team is opening up doors in the Quantum Unfolding Chamber, looking for hospitable worlds.

When asked if there was a world he wanted to show, but couldn’t, Gunn admitted:

Yeah, I wanted them to open the door and see Deadpool in a room. And I talked to Ryan Reynolds about it. But I think he had to go through some pretty big hoops to do that. He wanted to do it. That's going to be… oh, that's all anybody's going to talk about now is fucking Deadpool in the other room. I should never have said it.

Allow me to help James Gunn fulfill his own prophecy by being one of the sites who now reports that Deadpool almost appeared in the Peacemaker Season 2 finale. And that would have been hilarious. As we learned, the doors in the QUC could take people with access to this alien tech to all sorts of alternate universes. In the one explored in Peacemaker, which became known as Earth-X, the Nazis had won World War II, and Peacemaker’s father Auggie Smith was a powerful superhero. Still a white supremacist. But a superhero.

Deadpool basically is one of the few – if not the only – superhero who could cross dimensions and appear in a DC project. WIth Ryan Reynolds in the suit, the Merc with the Mouth makes a habit of circumventing narrative rules, breaking the fourth wall, and hopping through multiverses like he did in Deadpool & Wolverine.

Alas, it didn’t happen, and instead, A.R.G.U.S. discovered a planet that they are going to turn into a prison to metahumans. But more on that when the DCU continues with the upcoming series Lanterns, landing on HBO Max in 2026.