When “Superman” premiered in July, it served as the first big screen introduction of the new DC Universe, as overseen by DC Studios co-chiefs James Gunn and Peter Safran. But it turns out that Season 2 of Gunn’s HBO Max series “Peacemaker,” which concluded on Thursday, provides an even more crucial launching pad for the overarching story Gunn aims to tell within the DCU, with the introduction of two major new elements to the franchise from the DC Comics: The covert agency Checkmate, and the metahuman prison planet Salvation.
As Gunn explained in a virtual press conference on Tuesday (which Variety moderated), Salvation will play a central role in Gunn’s 2028 “Superman” sequel, “Man of Tomorrow.” But both concepts will be narrative threads that will run through the entire DCU, including DC Studios’ next HBO Max series, “Lanterns.”
“It may not seem like it at first, but it is all very connected,” he said.
In fact, Gunn has known he wanted to use Checkmate and Salvation for DC projects since before he and Safran were tapped to lead DC.
“That was always pretty instrumental in the overarching story that I’m telling in the DCU,” he said. “I had mapped out what I thought the general story was, and two important aspects to that were Checkmate and especially Salvation.”
So what is Checkmate and how is it introduced into the DCU?
In the “Peacemaker” season finale, which Gunn wrote and directed, the 11th Street Kids rally to rescue their friend and titular superhero, aka Chris Smith (John Cena) — not from some nefarious evildoer, but from himself. As a consequence of his misadventures in the Nazi-drenched alternate universe Earth-X in the previous episodes — in which he watched his father die in front of him, again, and nearly watched his brother die in front of him, again — Chris is convinced that he is, in his words, “the angel of fucking death.” He’s abandoned his home, cut himself off from his friends, and is wallowing in misery at a cheap motel.
