Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 Director James Gunn Reveals How Peacemaker and Suicide Squad Changed His Movie

James Gunn has been all over the comic book map the last couple of years. The filmmaker wrote and directed The Suicide Squad for Warner Bros. (after being fired and subsequently rehired by Marvel) and jumped immediately from that to its HBO Max spinoff series, Peacemaker. He’s got a second season of and another Suicide Squad spinoff in the works, but not before shooting Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, which is currently in production. 

Peacemaker and Guardians are obviously very different in tone and content, but that doesn’t mean Gunn can’t use lessons learned in one to help the other. While talking to Variety about the Peacemaker finale, Gunn was asked if Peacemaker and The Suicide Squad influenced his work on the third Guardians movie at all. 

“A little bit. I had as much fun as you could have during COVID making Peacemaker, and so I’m trying to apply that more to Vol. 3,” Gunn said. “In all truth, the first two Guardians, I love the cast and crew, but they were really difficult to make. And a lot of that was self-imposed difficulty by me. I realized after Vol. 2 that I couldn’t continue to live a life if I made everything I did like Vol. 2, which I just killed myself over, unnecessarily. I needed to balance my life a little bit better. And so I’ve been applying that to Vol. 3.”

It seems like Gunn mostly took lessons in his personal approach from his time on The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker, allowing himself to enjoy the experience again. The filmmaker went on, however, to say that he is also adjusting the way Guardians Vol. 3 is being shot, sticking closer to what he did with his DC stories.

“I think The Suicide Squad also has informed Vol. 3 a lot in terms of how we’re shooting it,” he continued. “There’s a different type of groundedness, I think, in this movie that we had in both Peacemaker and Suicide Squad. I learned so much from everything that I do.”

Peacemaker may be nothing like Guardians on the surface, but the latter will certainly benefit from Gunn’s experiences making the formner.

What did you think of the first season of Peacemaker? Are you looking forward to Guardians Vol. 3? Let us know in the comments!