Superman director James Gunn is doubling down on his recent Instagram post where he said that the second season of Peacemaker is essentially the “prequel” to upcoming Man of Steel sequel Man of Tomorrow.
Responding to a fan on the platform, Gunn reiterated that the season finale of the current Peacemaker series will lead “directly” into Man of Tomorrow, despite the fact that three other DCU projects—Supergirl, Lanterns, and Clayface—will all come out in-between.
Peacemaker‘s highly-acclaimed second season sees the character exploring an alternate universe via his personal collection of inter-dimensional doorways inherited from his late, white supremacist father who built his own personal TARDIS for extra storage space while also being actively hunted by Rick Flag, Sr. wanting vengeance for killing his son in Suicide Squad.
How exactly that will tee up the don’t-call-it-a-sequel sequel to Gunn’s Superman, we don’t know. But given Peacemaker‘s many-layered plot, there’ll certainly be a surplus of material to pull from. It does however raise an interesting question: Will audiences have to actually see Peacemaker—a big ask for some, given the show’s wanton hardcore violence, full-frontal nudity, offensive language, and existence on a boutique streaming platform—before they can enjoy Man of Tomorrow?
Almost certainly not, right? There really has yet to be a tie-in series to a superhero franchise that necessitated actually watching them before the next theatrical movie. Marvel’s tie-in shows on Disney+ have rather infamously reset themselves to status quo before their final episodes air: Loki was dead at the beginning of his series and remains dead by the end of it. Wanda Maximoff is grieving the death of Vision at the beginning of WandaVision, and despite her efforts, sets out to destroy reality in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Agatha Harkness is brainwashed at the end of WandaVision, and is stone cold dead by the end of Agatha All Along. A new Captain America threatens to replace the Falcon in The Falcon and Winter Soldier, but a few lines of dialogue in Thunderbolts confirms that didn’t happen. Ditto Isaiah Washington’s reappearance in Captain America: Brave New World. Gunn’s own Creature Commandos also didn’t end up baring any weight on the narrative flow of Superman… so no, you likely won’t need to see Peacemaker before Man of Tomorrow.
However, the suggestion that you might want to in order to fully get the movie is certainly impish if you have a kid who’s really into Superman. Gunn likely watched a lot of inappropriate, R-rated material as a kid—and look how he turned out! At its core Peacemaker is about an unstable man-child with an over-developed sense of justice learning to become a slightly better, slightly more balanced person, while also retaining that sense of justice so it can be put to better use. Isn’t that basically Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood?
Whatever the case, your kids are likely already watching way weirder shit on Youtube.
Man of Tomorrow is currently slated for a July 9, 2027 release date, while Peacemaker season two is currently airing on HBO Max.