As he did with many of his previous projects, writer-director James Gunn meticulously selected the songs that made it into Peacemaker. While his Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack spoke to Star-Lord's relationship with his mother, Gunn took the opposite approach for Peacemaker. As it turns out, the Peacemaker soundtrack is not only designed to capture Peacemaker's spirit, but also act as his rebellion against his father Auggie Smith, aka White Dragon.
"I think that that is the music that speaks to Peacemaker's spirit," Gunn said during a press event attended by CBR. "He loves hair metal, but I also think it speaks to a lot of the things that his dad is not. It's androgynous. I think of Peacemaker bringing home a Hanoi Rocks album with all the guys in the makeup and the fishnet stockings and everything else, or bringing home a Motley Crue album with a satanic symbol in the front, and those are direct affronts to who his father is. So I feel like music is something that belongs to Peacemaker and, as the series goes on, we see some of the reasons for why that's the case."
"From another perspective, I just have been wanting to use this type of music in something because it is -- like when I did the first Guardians, I think one of the fun [things] about it was we had all these 70s AM pop hits that were by bands we usually didn't know, especially in the first movie, or names of the songs we may not have known, but we heard," he added. "They were recognizable, but not well known, and to see them in this completely different, outer space setting was fresh and different."
"I think that hair metal is something that has been completely forgotten or covered up for the most part in this country, in the United States," he explained. "I'm a punk rock kid, so it wasn't really a music -- I like Hanoi Rocks a lot because they're more punk rock than hair metal, really, but it wasn't a music that I particularly loved, but I believe that there are great musicians and great artists almost everywhere if you seek them out."
"I started doing that a few years ago with this music and became obsessed with it -- and not only the old bands, the stuff from the 80s, but also there's a lot of modern sleaze rock from Northern Europe that I think is far superior to the majority of the stuff from the 80s, because they know exactly what they're doing," he shared. "It's not pompous in any way. They don't pretend to be serious. So anyway, I wanted to use that type of music and I felt like it was fun, being able to build it into the very fabric of the story itself. All the songs were written into the script, as I always do."
As revealed in the Peacemaker series premiere, Chris Smith has a very strained relationship with his father Auggie -- and for good reason. While Chris strives to be a superhero as Peacemaker (despite his unorthodox methods), Auggie is a straight up supervillain. As the White Dragon, Auggie leads a gang who believes in his white supremacist cause, which could spell trouble for Peacemaker and his A.R.G.U.S. allies as his relationship with his father continues to deteriorate.
Peacemaker's first three episodes are now streaming on HBO Max, with new episodes airing weekly on Thursdays.