John Cena has a brief cameo in this summer’s Superman as Peacemaker, the foul-mouthed mercenary the wrestler-turned-actor has played since 2021’s The Suicide Squad. That movie was part of the old DC Comics shared universe (DCEU), so it seemed odd that Cena’s character would appear in James Gunn’s new take on Superman, considering he was, ostensibly, part of a different multiverse. Well, Peacemaker’s second season premiered last night, and through a reshot scene, has plucked the antihero from one universe into another without making a huge stink about it.
In Peacemaker’s first season finale, Cena’s character met up with the Justice League from the previous film universe, including Jason Momoa’s Aquaman and Ezra Miller’s Flash. The rest of the team was mostly obscured in shadows and only seen as silhouettes, but Momoa and Miller’s presence makes it clear they’re likely accompanied by Henry Cavill’s version of Superman, who portrayed the superhero from 2013 to 2023. This ties Peacemaker to the old continuity, which again complicates Cena’s appearance in Superman.
Season two’s premiere episode, “The Ties That Grind,” addresses this with an opening sequence called “Previously in the DCU,” which recaps the previous season with one major change. Rather than calling the Justice League for help as he did in the finale, this section is reshot and redubbed to instead show the Justice Gang featured in Superman arriving on the scene. Nathan Fillion and Isabela Merced reprise their roles as Guy Gardner and Hawkgirl, while silhouettes of Superman, Supergirl, and Mister Terrific are also shown but obscured in shadow, like in the original scene.
In a roundtable interview with outlets like IGN, Gunn said that while fans might have expected a more convoluted multiversal explanation that pulled Peacemaker from one continuity to another, the director said he’d rather go with a simple approach.
“Could I make it so that Peacemaker is the DCEU Peacemaker, even though he’s not really the DCEU Peacemaker, and he walks through that portal, and that’s where the DCEU Peacemaker is?” Gunn said. “I could have, but people are like, ‘How are normies going to understand it?’ And no, the answer is, normies don’t give a shit. Normies don’t care about all this canon stuff so intimately.”
“It doesn’t matter if it’s not completely consistent in the past. So I thought the simple way was really the best, which is just saying, yeah, this world is a little different. We know there’s universes, and this is the universe in which everything was exactly the same as Season 1, except for the Justice League.”
Some fans might be annoyed at the handwavey nature of this change, but it’s probably a good thing Peacemaker didn’t have to spend a whole episode throwing its hero through the multiverse to justify him showing up in future projects. Now it can just get back to what it actually wants to do rather than wasting all those precious, costly minutes of runtime, not to mention the precious time of us viewers. New episodes of Peacemaker premiere on HBO Max on Thursday nights at 9 p.m. Eastern.