James Gunn Describes Critics Of 'Peacemaker' As Racists

DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn recently described critics of his second season of Peacemaker as as racists.

In an interview with GQ, Gunn was asked, “Peacemaker has become the flagship TV show, though. The next chapter after Superman. And yet it’s as weird and specific as it’s always been. Does that delight you as much as it delights me?”

Gunn replied, “The show delights me. I really do whatever I want with Peacemaker—and I mean, in one respect, I do whatever I want with anything, because I am able to make my own choices and I’m my own boss. But with Peacemaker, we really let it go. We take chances. We go to places where I think other people are afraid to go. We got a lot of pushback from various sources within the structure, on this episode in particular, and we’re like, “Let’s not be bashful about this. Let’s just do the story that we want to do and I don’t want to have to pull punches with it.”

Next, he brought up the criticism the show is receiving, “And it’s interesting because there hasn’t been that sort of... I have a few racists that have called me polarizing, but I’m okay with being polarizing and letting racists fall to the wayside. People have loved this episode the most, so it’s exciting.”

While the sixth episode does currently have the highest rating on IMDb with a 9.2, there are only 5,200 reviews.

Additionally, the show is not charting on Luminate’s top 10 Streaming Originals: Television chart.

For the week of September 19-25, the show had less than 273.9 million minutes watched. The show aired its fifth episode on September 18th and the sixth episode with the Earth X reveal on the 25th.

Nevertheless, Gunn was then asked to provide more clarity on who he is calling racist, “I assume the pushback you’re referring to was people asking, ‘Can we not do Nazi Earth right now…’ and not about, say, Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor showing up.”

He responded, “Yeah, no, Lex—everybody loves Lex being in there. That’s an easy one. They love the crossover with Superman and I love Nick in the episode, and Nick’s really happy with the episode, which I’m most happy with.”

“Listen, we’re dealing with a very sensitive subject. We’re dealing with racism and at the same time, there’s humor in this episode,” Gunn said. “And so, you’re dealing with something very delicate and yet we’re not being delicate about it—but I don’t think we’re not being delicate in a non-thoughtful way. I think we’re being thoughtful about it. When I was first writing the episodes and I first finished the episode, I sent it to Danielle Brooks and we had a big conversation. I wanted to make sure she was okay with everything.”

“I’m not sure if I was watching it as a casual viewer that I would’ve noticed what was going on in Earth X. I think everybody online noticed what was happening, but also because they were discussing it. I showed the whole season to people before that and they did not notice at all. And it wasn’t all white friends, it was people of color, white people, everybody who just didn’t notice that all the extras were white every time we went to Earth X. And so, it was about the stuff with that—Adebayo specifically, and what happens at the end, because you don’t want to treat it lightly and there’s a humorous aspect to it, but it’s also very scary. It was about the way we handled all that,” Gunn concluded.

While Gunn accuses his critics of racism, he previously admitted to promoting race swaps because he said there were too many white characters. And he wouldn’t make a character white “because there are already so many white superheroes.”

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