UPDATE: Holland is now saying the same thing about Gunn’s next movie — she says Man of Tomorrow might be his best film yet.
Jennifer Holland is taking credit for the version of Peacemaker Season 2 that made it to the screen, the same season that shed nearly 40% of its audience and won’t be getting a Season 3.
Speaking with ComicBook.com, Holland — who plays Emilia Harcourt and is married to James Gunn — revealed she gave Gunn notes on an early draft of Season 2 that convinced him to throw the whole thing out and start over.
“I read the first draft of, like, an earlier version of the story that he was coming up with. I was like, we haven’t seen these characters for like three years by this time,” Holland said. “We want to know what’s been going on with the characters. Where have they been? What’s changed in their lives?”
According to Holland, Gunn “ended up scrapping that and just started over new.”
“That’s when he came up with the story about, you know, Season 2 that we have now, which was really grounded in the relationships, in the loss of Chris’s brother, and what has happened to Harcourt’s career and how that has changed who she is,” she said, adding that it “really made for, I think, an incredibly dynamic season.”
The “Incredibly Dynamic Season” the Audience Walked Out On
Here’s the problem: the audience didn’t agree.
As we reported, the Peacemaker Season 2 finale drew just 435k households over its first four days per Samba TV — 150k fewer than the Season 1 finale — a drop of roughly 39% from the Season 2 premiere.
None of the Season 2 episodes cracked the weekly Nielsen streaming charts during their release, with the show only scraping onto the bottom of the Originals chart after Nielsen counted every available episode, and Gunn himself confirmed there won’t be a Season 3.
So the “grounded in the relationships” rewrite that Holland is taking credit for is the version of the show that started with a premiere boost over the Season 1 finale — meaning fans showed up excited — and then bled viewers week after week until the finale landed well below where Season 1 ended.
Fans tuned in for the wild, irreverent Peacemaker they got in Season 1. What they got instead was the relationship-drama version, and they voted with their remotes.
Notes From the Inner Circle
The anecdote also says a lot about how the DCU has been run.
Gunn scrapped an entire season’s worth of scripts based on notes from his wife and star, and Peacemaker Season 2 was the project Gunn billed as the direct follow-up to his Superman movie, which itself underperformed at the box office.
The head of HBO also said in March that DC projects are now being judged on a script-by-script basis by him, not because they are part of some larger master plan.
It’s also the same insular creative bubble that produced Supergirl.
Holland is free to call it an incredibly dynamic season. The numbers call it something else.
And she’s already moved on to the next one: Holland now says Man of Tomorrow “might be James’s best” movie — of course.
