Peacemaker Season 2 is underway but it’s been quite some time since Season 1 (nearly three years!), so it was nice to get a sizable recap for the first season at the start of the Season 2 premiere. What is interesting is that the recap decided to revisit a pivotal moment from the end of Season 1: the appearance of the DCEU Justice League. But, in something that initially stunned me, the characters had been replaced by the current DCU Justice Gang.
Naturally, this has led to a ton of justifications and lamentations by nerds online about alternate universes and canon and all the stuff that isn’t remotely interesting about storytelling. In my opinion, James Gunn did the exact right thing with this moment in order to establish the DCU and put the DCEU in the rearview mirror.
Just Go With It
The moment of the DCEU Justice League showing up in Peacemaker was a fun little moment, but it is by no means is some piece of sacred text. The realignment for DC at the movies was a crappy deal that James Gunn got handed. He had already contributed to the process with The Suicide Squad and the first season of Peacemaker, but then he was given the keys to the kingdom to run it his way. He had to make sense of a disparate strategy for the DCEU and move forward with his DCU artistic plan.
I appreciate James Gunn even entertaining the holdover factors of the DCEU, but it’s now clear that he has paved over any lingering threads from those movies. It’s a mindset that needs to be better embraced with the DCU moving forward because reasonable adults know how to just go with the flow. One of the things I was worried about with the DCU was that it would canonically acknowledge the DCEU in some kind of pandering way for that fanbase. Instead, James Gunn went forward with the kind of storytelling mature viewers understand.
Canon Is the Enemy
The obsession with canon and being able to link up every single piece of a storytelling universe has become a plague upon discourse. James Gunn has stated that the DCU will feature a true variety of films, and though they will respect the canon of other movies, they will feel distinct unto themselves. I hope this ends up being the case as canon has become the thing I care the least about with superhero cinema. I want movies that tell their own stories and aren’t feeling handicapped, narratively or stylisticially, by some sense of canon.
By outright pasting over the DCEU in the Peacemaker recap, James Gunn has already shown he is not going to feel beholden to some imaginary sense of canon responsibility when the story matters more. I know this will get a lot harder to manage as the DCU marches on, but I’m all for ignoring canon when the story benefits from doing so. There are always going to be insufferable pedants when it comes to canon, but they will always have their wiki dungeons to crawl back into while the rest of us adults enjoy a story being a good story.
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