James Gunn on ‘Peacemaker’ Finale and the DCU’s Future

F
rom creating the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise’s mixtapes to making the obscure Iggy Pop/Teddybears nugget “Punkrocker” one of the songs of the summer via Superman, DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn has an impeccable record when it comes to mixing music with superhero universes. Peacemaker‘s just-concluded second season, with its killer Foxy Shazam theme song (“Oh Lord”) and its finale performances by both Foxy and the long-haired rock band Nelson (playing the very deep cut “To Get Back to You”), was no exception. Gunn jumped on a Zoom with Rolling Stone to talk about the season’s music and some broader DCU topics. (Some spoilers ahead — and to see what Matthew Nelson had to say about his band’s appearance, check out our new interview with him and Gunn.)

Why Nelson? Why this song? How did it happen?
I picked the song first. As you know, when I’m putting together songs for Peacemaker, I’m working from a massive list — at this point it’s a couple thousand songs that I think are Peacemaker-like songs. When I write a scene that utilizes a piece of music, sometimes I’m sort of inspired by the music to write the scenes, but a lot of times I’m like, “This is a good place for a piece of music. What should I listen to?” And so I go through my list. For this moment, it just seemed the perfect moment for it. And I truly believe that Nelson album, [2010’s] Lightning Strikes Twice, is a great album. I mean, nobody knows it. But the whole album is a pretty great example of melodic rock. And the song is fantastic.

You’re about to change the course of that song’s life.
Yeah, for sure. Like with the Foxy Shazam song, it really is just a fucking great song.

You had that one in your pocket already?
No. I mean, I knew the song. It was one of my favorite Foxy Shazam songs. And I’m a really, truly an enormous fan of the band. But I listened to a lot of different songs to try to figure it out, and I really didn’t know what I was gonna do. Was I gonna use [Wig Wam’s] “Do You Wanna Taste It” again? Was I gonna use something else? And it really had the effect that I thought it would, which is at first everybody was complaining about, “Oh, I like the old song better. I like the old intro better.” And now, as we go into the eighth episode, the most common comment I get on threads is, “Wow, I didn’t like it as much at first, but now I like it even more.” And it is such an emotional song. It really works in this scene as well.

Was it always locked into your head that you would have them perform the song on the show?
No, but it was always locked in my head that I was going to use the song at the end of the show. In the same way there was always this concept that, you know, “Do You Wanna Taste It” has various different meanings, but it ends up being kind of about the blood in Harcourt’s mouth at the end of episode eight. And this song would be about the gathering together of these damaged souls in [new team] Checkmate. So that was always the plan that I would use this song.

But the idea to put Foxy Shazam in the show was a last-minute addition. I became friends with Eric Nally, the singer of Foxy Shazam. And I was like, you know what, we’re gonna be shooting Nelson anyway. What if we had just a couple shots of them and the reveal of them at this concert? And really what it all is leading to is the reason the song is playing is because this was the song where Harcourt and Peacemaker fully came together, kind of as boyfriend-girlfriend at the end of the show.

Are you thinking about ways to use songs in cool ways in other upcoming DCU projects? Or are you leaving that to the individual creators?
It’s a mix. There’s sometimes some hackneyed use of music and I really don’t like it. I really don’t need to hear “Ballroom Blitz” in another movie for as long as I live. Love the band, but don’t need to hear “Ballroom Blitz” in a movie ever again. So when something like that comes up, and it comes up pretty often in these different projects and they’re like, “Oh, James will like this because it’s Seventies music.” . I’m like, I don’t like Seventies music. That was what fit the Guardians. I mean, I do like Seventies music. I like all music.

I’ve become a sleaze-metal guy because of Peacemaker, which is a journey that started before this actually. But I’m really a punk-rock guy. All day long I’ve been listening to my 2025 list, which is a lot of [Canadian punk band] Pup and [Irish punk band] Sprints and then also a lot of other modern alternative, a lot of hip-hop. There’s this guy named Russell — that’s an amazing hip-hop artist. There’s a lot of cool stuff out.

In the upcoming stuff — the Supergirl movie and the HBO Max show Lanterns — are you thinking that way about songs?
There’s songs in both of those things. But I don’t give a shit if there’s songs in something or not. For me, I use songs like — listen, Superman to me was a score movie. There’s just the one song that is strangely probably the biggest sort of hit song I’ve had out of a show that wasn’t Wig Wam. You know, maybe “Come and Get Your Love” from the first Guardians. But everybody knew “Come and Get Your Love.” It was like a rediscovery of a song from a new perspective

Regarding the vicious twist at the end of Peacemaker from what seemed to be a happy ending — first of all, what’s wrong with you?
Listen, this journey’s not done.

Should people expect that thread to be enormous going forward?
Yeah.

Since you said you’re setting up the semisequel to Superman, Man of Tomorrow, should people expect John Cena’s fate, Peacemaker’s fate, to be addressed in that movie?
No, no, no. But people should expect that the way that the military and Rick Flagg and everybody are working together and they’ve created a probably illegal prison for metahumans on another dimension is gonna be a part of DCU stories going forward. And not just a tertiary, ‘Oh, this is Arkham’ — it’s a part of the stories. There’s an escalating war, obviously, that’s going on between the government and metahumans. And this is a part of it.

So, to be clear, you’ve made a key part of the DCU going forward about a government official abusing their power by having masked thugs come in the middle of the night and expel innocent people from the planet.
[Grins.] It’s just totally fiction, Brian. This is, like, something that can never happen on our planet, but that’s the beauty of things like comic books — you can explore things that would never, ever happen on our world.

This war, this thread — will we be seeing this in things like Lanterns and Supergirl? Or is this really your arc and not necessarily the larger story?
No, no. Both those things are worked in. We knew both of those stories were a part of what we originally put together, so they’re part of the overall tapestry, but they’re also their own thing. Supergirl especially is a space adventure. It’s like Guardians. Lanterns is its own thing. There’s just a longer, sort of a bigger world we’re building with all these different pieces and they do all come together and intersect sometimes in a story fashion and sometimes just in a, you know, “here’s another piece of the world” fashion.

Are there other big arcs for this phase?
Yeah, yeah. Lanterns is really important in setting up things.

People are wondering, by the way, if James Mangold’s just-announced deal means that the Swamp Thing movie he was planning for you is dead.
No, no, it doesn’t. No.

So you’re hopeful on that still?
Yeah, I mean, yeah, totally. Absolutely. Yeah. We’ve talked to him. He’s still invested. So we’ll see. Some things take a long time. We’ll see what happens.

Are you going to announce a Checkmate show with the new team formed at the end of this season? Or are we just left to wonder how this is going to carry forward?
We’ll find out as time goes on. It’s a mystery.

Poor Chris, poor Peacemaker. That planet he’s on doesn’t sound so uninhabited. There’s something moaning in the background.
Doesn’t sound good, does it? There’s a comic series called Salvation Run. So the story is very different, but that’s where the concept is from. And so there’s some things — some of those elements are definitely a part of the future.