Oh Lord! Peacemaker’s S2 Teaser Was Just the Beginning

The Emmy-nominated DC Spinoff Series From James Gunn Details Larger-Than-Life Foes, Returning Characters, and More Character Growth

In one of San Diego Comic-Con’s many explosive hall offerings this past weekend, HBO Max revealed a full-length trailer for Season 2 of Peacemaker, James Gunn’s Emmy-nominated, DC spinoff series. The first extended look at what’s in store for season two of the Christopher Smith-led series, the trailer details new threats, familiar faces, and something fans have been waiting to see since last season: real character development for Gunn’s would-be DC hero.

Peacemaker follows the now-infamous character of Christopher Smith, aka Peacemaker, as he takes on increasingly large and multiverse-defying missions. While Gunn himself made quick work of last season’s action-hero antics, this season is poised to introduce even more peril, insanity, and feels.

After five months of internal struggle and recovery following Season 1’s harrowing finale and near-death gunshot wound, Smith, AKA Peacemaker, is back at it. Recruited by a team of new characters under a new government mission called “Project Butterfly,” Peacemaker, played by John Cena, joins forces with a group of government specialists and fellow upstart heroes.

They are Clemson Murn (Chukwudi Iwuji), A.R.G.U.S. agent John Economos (Steve Agee), NSA agent Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland), and new Peacemaker ally Leota Adebayo (Danielle Brooks). The mission is simple enough at first: track down and contain an alien threat. However, Project Butterfly is revealed to be much more than another violent government job.

The mission task force is sent on a hunt for an alien race that takes the form of parasitic butterflies. The insects can inhabit and take over human hosts and have begun making their way to Earth. After a series of hilarious and horrifying moments, the ragtag group is victorious. After a bloody showdown in a ranch desert, most of the team can escape with their lives, but not without serious injury, trauma, and a killer butterfly that ate Peacemaker.

Peacemaker Season 2 now returns to a much-changed DCU and landscape of Earth itself. While Gunn’s previous series was based in the still-recently-DCEU, the second season of Peacemaker will jump into the new DCU: a freshly minted continuity that Gunn himself first introduced as part of his “Gods and Monsters” slate of original DC stories and projects. Gunn, in a follow-up, confirmed that events and history, except for some potential cameos from Justice League members, remain canon.

The returning cast of Peacemaker includes mainstays Cena, Brooks, Holland, Agee, and Freddie Stroma, who plays the fan-favorite psychopath Vigilante. Also reprising is Nhut Le, who plays Judomaster, a new character who appears this season alongside Eagly, Peacemaker’s pet bald eagle and staunchest sidekick. Robert Patrick, as Peacemaker’s dead father, Auggie Smith, also returns for this season. Frank Grillo, as Rick Flagg Sr., joins this season as well. The character is the late Rick Flagg’s father, who was killed by Peacemaker in Gunn’s own The Suicide Squad. Grillo’s character, Flagg Sr., is currently the head of A.R.G.U.S., a government special effects agency that the team previously worked for, and has one goal in mind, according to Gunn: vengeance. Tim Meadows joins the series as agent Langston Fleury, while Sol Rodriguez plays Sasha Bordeaux. Michael Rooker, as Eagly’s “nemesis,” Red St. Wild, also makes a Season 2 appearance.

Based on the official synopsis, Chris Smith this season finds himself in the middle of the weight of the damage he’s caused, the trauma of the near-death experience, and the desire to do better, be better. The Emmy-nominated, muscle-bound hero is ready to do more than make a world a better place at any cost—he’s set on making it a hero this time.

In a teaser released last month in May, Gunn first gave fans a brief look at the season’s ridiculous and explosive energy and action. The teaser was set to the soundtrack of the single “Oh Lord” by Foxy Shazam, and while only a minute in length, it set the stage for a Peacemaker Season 2 unlike the first.

In it, Cena’s Christopher Smith can be seen receiving an abrupt rejection from the Justice League. Flanked by Green Lantern/Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion), Hawkgirl/Kendra Saunders (Isabela Merced), and Maxwell Lord (Sean Gunn), the team reprises their roles from Gunn’s last DC hero-team flick, Superman, and has little patience for Cena’s smarmy superhero. Naturally, he doesn’t get the gig.

But it isn’t all bad news for our antihero. The teaser also features fun character details fans have been waiting on since the close of Season 1. Fans learned that Adebayo is now “living in the worst level of Grand Theft Auto,” according to Economos, Harcourt is experiencing “a particularly severe form of toxic masculinity,” and Vigilante is now in the food service industry.

The trailer’s biggest reveal? A dimensional wormhole-like portal. In a shocking end to the trailer and a welcome surprise to Peacemaker fans, Chris Smith stumbles across and into a wormhole that whisks him off to a parallel universe. After the dimensional jump, Chris meets another version of himself, one he’s been dreaming about, hoping for, for as long as he can remember. Not only is this version of him a confirmed, “true” hero, but he’s also been loved and accepted and has a significant other at home. Frustrated with where he is in his own world and in his love life, Peacemaker seriously contemplates staying. But of course, as these things go, his past catches up to him fast. “No matter how green the grass is over there, you belong here. With us,” Harcourt confidently and bitterly tells Smith.

In an SDCC panel in Hall H, Gunn spoke at length about the new season of Peacemaker and what makes this season stand apart. “I like TV shows where the characters don’t just return every season and they’re the same characters,” Gunn explained. “I like to see growth. I like 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.”

Premiering on August 21, 2025, exclusively on HBO Max, Peacemaker Season 2 promises fans the insanity and deadpan comedy of Peacemaker and his band of misfits—but more importantly, deep dive character and multiverse storytelling.