Peacemaker season two just did the most DC Comics thing ever. In the “Previously On” intro before the first episode begins, we witness the moment from the season one finale where the Justice Gang arrives too late to help Peacemaker and pals thwarted the alien invasion. We see the shadowy silhouettes of Superman, Hawkgirl, Mister Terrific, Guy Gardner, and presumably Supergirl arrive as Peacemaker walks by and tells them off, already having saved the day. Hawkgirl and Guy trade a few quips, and Superman and the rest say nothing.
Of course, Peacemaker season one fans will remember things differently. Back in 2022, it was the Justice League, specifically Jason Momoa’s Aquaman and Ezra Miller’s Flash, who showed up and cracked jokes instead. This is all James Gunn’s cheeky way of saying “Everything from season one happened as you remember it, except it was the Justice Gang, not the Justice League, who showed up at the end.” Funnily enough, this is the most DC Comics approach to storytelling that Gunn could have taken. Because DC did this exact same thing regarding its own history a lot in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
In the 1985 event series Crisis on Infinite Earths, the then-fifty-year-old DC Universe continuity was massively changed. Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman had their histories greatly altered in new reboots. However, some of the old DC continuity remained. So, there still was a Justice League of America. Only some characters, specifically Wonder Woman, were no longer part of its early history. So when post-Crisis comics retold the formation and early years of the Justice League? Now, they’d show the same classic adventures, but with Black Canary in the place of Wonder Woman in the story.
The post-Crisis DC landscape had to do this “It happened, just not the way you remember it” approach with a metric ton of characters. Mainly because DC Comics rebooted its three biggest characters, causing a ripple effect throughout their own timeline. Some forty years later, DC Comics is still trying to untangle the mess they made for themselves. Comics like The New History of the DC Universe are still attempting to make sense of it all. And now the cinematic DC universe is having to do the very same thing.
Obviously, some things from the old DCEU are still canon to this new DCU. Movies like The Suicide Squad and plain old Suicide Squad seem to remain a part of the history. But they deleted just about everything else. No Man of Steel, BvS, Wonder Woman, Shazam, Aquaman, or their respective sequels count any longer. So did the DCEU suffer a massive multiversal Crisis of its own, one that we just never saw play out? We suppose that if we wanted to make 2023’s The Flash an event that changed history, that might work. However, the end of that movie showed Ezra Miller as Barry Allen still in this rebooted reality, not to mention George Clooney as Bruce Wayne. And we know that’s not likely to be canon in the current DCU.
Ultimately, this approach will be a far less painful headache for the DC Studios than it was for DC Comics. From what we can tell, Peacemaker is the only major “active” element from the old DCEU still in continuity. We suppose the two adjacent Suicide Squad projects merit inclusion due to their proximity to him. And we suppose Gunn may include Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn eventually, although that means her Joker is still Jared Leto, and we’d just rather….not go there. In the end, James Gunn handled this continuity issue the best way possible, by just making it fun. Sometimes, that’s enough.