Peacemaker: John Cena Plays Coy About Cameoing in Other DCU Projects

Peacemaker has become one of DC’s biggest adaptations in recent memory, chronicling the R-rated exploits of John Cena’s Christopher Smith / Peacemaker. The live-action series is currently working on its second season, and given the fact that series creator James Gunn is co-CEO of the upcoming DC Universe of movies and Max-exclusive television shows, some have wondered if Cena will appear elsewhere in the franchise. During a recent appearance at Comicpalooza, Cena did not offer a public comment on that possibility, joking that he doesn’t want to make Gunn angry.

“Do you know who James Gunn is?” Cena answered with a laugh. “He’s got this look when you make him mad. And it’s actually indescribable, but I don’t want to see it ever again. So I’m just gonna say… no comment.”

Is Peacemaker Season 2 in the New DCU?

While the first season of Peacemaker was created within the DC Extended Universe, even showing that universe’s version of the Justice League, it has been confirmed that it will be a part of Gunn and Peter Safran’s “reset” DC Universe. As Gunn has promised on the social media platform Threads, this rollout of the DCU’s canon won’t be “confusing” to fans.

“Nothing is canon until Creature Commandos [in 2024] — a sort of aperitif to the DCU — and then a deeper dive into the universe with [Superman] after that,” Gunn shared on Threads last year. “It’s a very human drive to want to understand everything all the time, but I think it’s okay to be confused on what’s happening in the DCU since no one has seen anything from the DCU yet.”

What Is On the DC Universe Slate?

As Gunn and Safran revealed in early 2023, the initial DC Studios slate for “Gods and Monsters” will include movies for Superman, The Brave and the Bold, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, Swamp Thing, and The Authority. It will include the HBO Max television shows Waller, Booster Gold, Lanterns, Paradise Lost, and an animated Creature Commandos series. Reports have also indicated that a live-action Teen Titans movie and an animated Jurassic League movie are in the works.

“A lot of people think it’s going to be Marvel 2.0, and definitely I learned a lot of stuff at Marvel. I think that we have a lot of differences,” Gunn explained at the time. “We are telling a big, huge, central story that is like Marvel, except for, I think that we’re a lot more planned out than Marvel from the beginning because we’ve gotten a group of writers together to work that story out completely. But we’re also creating a universe that is like Star Wars, where there’s different times, different places, different things, or Game of Thrones, where characters are a little bit more morally complex.”