Superman ending, James Gunn sets up the new DCU and Peacemaker season 2

This article contains spoilers from Superman. 

Superman, the first film in a new rebooted era for the DC superhero franchise, flew into theaters this weekend. And, as writer/director/studio head James Gunn promised, it proved to be “pretty important in terms of getting to the bigger story” told across the franchise.

The movie establishes a world in which humanity has known about the existence of metahumans (super-powered beings) for 300 years. For three of those, they’ve known about Superman (David Corenswet). The film serves as a fairly self-contained story that doesn’t require much homework or forward thinking on the part of the audience. But between the main narrative engine and all the special guests that pop up, Gunn subtly (and not-so subtly) points to this larger DC universe (DCU) that he’s building with studio co-head Peter Safran that will play out across a series of interconnected movies and shows.

With the Superman ending, he specifically sets up something that will heavily play into the events of the next project, Peacemaker season 2 (on HBO Max this Aug. 21).

Peacemaker and pocket universes

Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), the tech billionaire archvillain, used Big Bang science to create a dimension that exists outside of our own. He uses it largely for two purposes: to travel near-instantaneously around the globe through various portals, and to shield his more nefarious activities from the public eye.

This pocket universe notably contains his band of genetically engineered, super-intelligent monkeys that flood the internet with misinformation and hate speech about Superman, as well as his prison for all those who personally wronged him. It then serves a third function as Luthor’s weapon of mass destruction.

To distract the Man of Steel from stopping the conflict between Boravia and Jarhanpur, Luthor creates a rift from one of his portals that quickly begins to tear through Metropolis like an unstoppable earthquake.

Gunn previously confirmed the pocket universe is directly linked to something already introduced in Peacemaker, starring John Cena as the titular antihero. Season 1, which ran from January to February 2022, included the Quantum Unfolding Chamber, or QUC for short. It was created by Auggie Smith (Robert Patrick), Peacemaker’s father, as storage space that exists outside of our dimension.

Aside from the fact that Cena himself cameos in Superman, Gunn told Entertainment Weekly the QUC is similar to the technology explored in the movie. “The QUC is the center of the story in Peacemaker season 2,” he said in a May interview, adding, “We see a lot of different characters from Superman in the [season].”

He specifically mentioned two members of the Justice Gang, a super-trio introduced in Superman. Isabela Merced will return as Hawkgirl/Kendra Saunders alongside Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner and Sean Gunn as Maxwell Lord, the team’s billionaire backer. “And then we see a bunch of other characters later on in the [Peacemaker] season from other parts of the DCU and from Superman,” Gunn continued. “There might even be one really, really, really big cameo near the end of the show.”

The first teaser trailer for Peacemaker season 2 included one major clue as to how the QUC and this pocket universe technology will be important. One scene shows Cena’s Peacemaker encountering another identical-looking Peacemaker, which suggests a parallel-dimension counterpart. Dare we say…a multiverse?

Other DCU connections

There are a number of other ways that Superman, at the very least, sets up this fictional world.

The most obvious are the cameos, like Cena’s Peacemaker. Frank Grillo’s Rick Flag, Sr., first appearing in animated form in last year’s Creature Commandos, arrived in Superman as the Secretary of Defense. He’ll then have a bigger part to play in Peacemaker season 2.