Peacemaker Season 2 Almost Featured A Marvel Cameo – Here's Why James Gunn Cut It

This post contains spoilers for the "Peacemaker" season 2 finale.

The season 2 finale of "Peacemaker" opened a lot of doors, one of which led to a location that could have major implications for the future of the DC Universe. However, showrunner and DC Studios co-head James Gunn ultimately decided against having the 11th Street Kids (or, should we say, Checkmate) potentially coming face to face with the mouthiest hero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In an interview with Deadline, Gunn confessed that he'd considered crossing the streams of Marvel and DC's cinematic universes by having none other than Ryan Reynolds' Deadpool show up in "Peacemaker" season 2. In fact, he and Reynolds even had actual honest-to-goodness conversations about making it happen. 

According to Gunn:

"Yeah, I wanted them to open the door and see Deadpool in a room. I talked to Ryan Reynolds about it, and we'd have had to go through some pretty, pretty big hoops to do that. He wanted to do it. That's all anybody's going to talk about now is f*****g Deadpool in the other room."

Truthfully, if one were to open a door-shaped can of worms like that, you can guarantee comic book fans would have a mild panic attack. Really, there's something quite fitting about the idea of John Cena's Peacemaker and Reynolds' Wade Wilson — two of the sweariest superheroes of the screen — meeting up. But while that didn't happen this time around, does the fact that a live-action Marvel/DC crossover was even seriously discussed bring the possibility of one that much closer to a reality?

As it stands, Gunn's DCU has already referenced the Marvel universe on two separate occasions. Firstly, Dr. Phosphorous (Alan Tudyk) was referred to as Ghost Rider in "Creature Commandos," while both Vigilantes (Freddie Stroma) flipped out while doing the Spider-Man pointing meme in "Peacemaker" season 2, episode 6. And while these may just be throwaway gags, Gunn has openly discussed the potential of a crossover with characters from these different comic book worlds bumping into one another. The only problem? There has to be a good artistic reason to do it beyond "just because."

"I think people wanna see good stories with their superheroes, and that's what matters. And they wanna see different types of stories with their superheroes. And people love superheroes. That's obvious, but they need more variety, and they need just more quality storytelling," Gunn theorized in an interview with Rolling Stone. "And just having Spider-Man and Superman team up isn't gonna do it if it's s**t. So, it's gotta come from a real place, and it's really hard to make that work."

Given these comments and the news about the Deadpool cameo that never was, it sounds like Gunn isn't totally against a Marvel Cinematic Universe/DC Universe crossover at some point; it just has to serve an actual narrative purpose. For now, let's just be glad that Gunn is doing a good job of rebuilding one universe from scratch before he even considers taking a peek at another one.

"Peacemaker" is now streaming on HBO Max.