The second season of Peacemaker is currently filming, and James Gunn is now starting to slowly peel back the curtain on what to expect from the Max series’ return. In the first real bit of casting news, it’s been revealed that Frank Grillo will appear as Rick Flag, Sr.
Grillo had already been tapped to play the elder Flag for the upcoming Creature Commandos animated TV show that’s still yet to premiere. On Instagram, Gunn noted that Rick Sr. will recur throughout the season, and that he’s got “unfinished business” with John Cena’s titular antihero. Peacemaker killed Rick Jr. (played by Joel Kinnaman) in 2021’s The Suicide Squad, remember, something he admitted to feeling guilty about in that previous season. Given that Grillo’s played pretty violent badasses in franchises like The Purge, Skyline, and the MCU movies, that probably won’t just be a simple one-on-one conversation and apology.
Back when he and Peter Safran were first appointed as the new DC movie heads, Gunn revealed his plans to have actors reprise their roles across multiple mediums: if someone plays a character in a live-action movie, they’ll be that same person in animation, video games, you get the idea. We’ve already sort of seen this with Cena playing Peacemaker again in Mortal Kombat 1, but Creature Commandos—also written by Gunn, and whose cast includes Alan Tudyk, Maria Balakova, and David Harbour—will really be the first test of this. Creatures is also expected to be the kickoff point for the first phase of this new DC universe, which ratchets up the conversation (and pressure) around Peacemaker’s sophomore outing
Neither that or Creature Commandos have a release date locked in at time of writing. But it’ll be interesting to see how the two shows play off one another, and how we get from one Rick Flag Sr. to another.
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