Peacemaker Season 2: Everything Revealed in the New Trailer

If you thought the ending of Season 1 left things wide open for a whole lot of crazy action, then you’re going to go nuts for the full-length trailer for Season 2 of Peacemaker. The Emmy-nominated DC spinoff series from James Gunn director, opened San Diego Comic-Con 2024 this past weekend with the big reveal.

The new season will include a whole lot more, all going as big, weird, and emotionally charged as ever. It’s the first extended look at what fans can expect from John Cena’s Christopher Smith, aka Peacemake, in the highly anticipated second season. For as out there as Gunn can get with this material, there’s some core human element this season that could leave Cena’s titular hero changed in more ways than one.

Season 1 took place five months after the events of the 2021 Warner Bros. film, The Suicide Squad. Peacemaker returned just weeks after the events of the feature film, with Cena’s Smith just barely alive from a near-fatal gunshot. He was quickly recruited by the U.S. government to lead a new undercover operation codenamed “Project Butterfly.” He was eventually joined by a new team under the command of Clemson Murn (Chukwudi Iwuji) with support from A.R.G.U.S. agent John Economos (Steve Agee), NSA agent Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland), and new team member Leota Adebayo (Danielle Brooks).

Season 1 of Peacemaker found out that Project Butterfly was anything but what it seemed. Tasked with ending a real-life alien threat, the team was after an intergalactic species of parasitic butterflies that had found their way to Earth and been taken in as hosts by unwitting human subjects. By the end of Season 1, the unlikely team of assassins was able to kill the bizarre butterfly creatures in a wild, bloody showdown on a ranch, with every member managing to narrowly escape with their lives.

Peacemaker Season 2 picks up after the botched yet nonetheless victorious mission. Gunn’s DCU is changed as the future of the superhero multiverse changed with Season 1 now existing in the past after the production shut down following the theatrical release of 2019’s Justice League. Season 2 will exist in the new DCU proper, teased by Gunn himself as his “Gods and Monsters” slate of DCU storytelling. However, Gunn has stated that past events of the entire DCEU still hold up as canon, save for the loss of Lex Luthor, Amanda Waller, Starro, and Polka-Dot Man. Fans can expect to see most of the ensemble from the first season return to the series, minus a few Justice League cameo appearances.

Season 1 confirmed the returning cast for Cena, Brooks, Holland, Agee, and Freddie Stroma as the fan-favorite unhinged antihero Vigilante. Returning will be Nhut Le as Judomaster, and Eagly, Peacemaker’s bald eagle sidekick, who has proven crucial as an independent-minded bird with a mind of his own.

Robert Patrick also returns to reprise his role from Season 1 as Peacemaker’s dead father, Auggie Smith, as his larger-than-life presence still looms. However, there are also some new faces for Peacemaker to team up with or, well, try to avoid. Frank Grillo will be appearing as Rick Flagg Sr., Rick Flagg’s father, killed in the most recent Suicide Squad feature film. With the Flagg patriarch now at the head of A.R.G.U.S. in the wake of Amanda Waller’s absence, it will be interesting to see if Flagg has any interest in vengeance against Peacemaker, who killed his son. Also new this season is Tim Meadows as agent Langston Fleury, Sol Rodriguez as Sasha Bordeaux, and Michael Rooker as Red St. Wild, Eagly’s so-called “nemesis.”

Officially, Season 2 will find Chris Smith still working through the emotional trauma of his violent past. While his internal conflict will certainly add some drama and some development for a character that can usually have little redeeming qualities at times, the showrunners also shared that this season will include a new challenge to Peacemaker’s egotistic belief that he knows best. This season, Smith wants to earn the peace he wants so badly. As the character himself puts it in the trailer, he wants to become a hero.

A teaser for Season 2 was released in May, which dropped the first real hints at the outlandish action and humor to come. The trailer is fittingly set to Foxy Shazam’s “Oh Lord” as audiences are given first a look at a failed Chris’s attempt at getting onto the Justice League—appearing as Green Lantern/Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion), Hawkgirl/Kendra Saunders (Isabela Merced), and Maxwell Lord (Sean Gunn) all returning to the DCU following their roles in Superman. His pitch to get into the League is, naturally, awkwardly received.

In addition to fun and wild updates to what Cena’s character has been up to, as well as the status of supporting characters, the teaser also included fan-favorite inside jokes for long-time Gunnies like the Superman Easter Egg above. The one reveal in the trailer that fans were seemingly not expecting? A dimensional portal.

In a scene that will no doubt leave fans’ minds completely blown, Chris stumbles into a whole other universe where he finds a version of himself that, unlike himself, has become a real, true hero. Irritated with his status as a villain and general romantic failures, Smith considers trying to start over in this multiversal world. Of course, his past eventually catches up to him. An apathetic Harcourt delivers a hard dose of reality in the form of some real truth to power: “No matter how green the grass is over there, you belong here. With us.”

Addressing the new season in the Hall H panel at SDCC, Gunn had a lot to say on character development. “I like TV shows where the characters don’t just return every season and they’re the same characters,” Gunn said. “I want to see growth. I want to see change—and sometimes regression. Peacemaker is a different guy this year. He’s dealing with the demons he uncovered from the first season and trying to deal with them, and the world is not accepting him the way he is. They aren’t accepting him as a hero.”

Season 2 of Peacemaker debuts August 21, 2025, exclusively on HBO Max.