Peacemaker Season 2: James Gunn’s obsession with Kaiju and why giant monsters keep crashing into his DCU

James Gunn doesn’t just flirt with kaiju. He drags them into every corner of his cinematic universes, as if the genre itself were his secret fuel.

In The Suicide Squad, the DCU’s first giant villain was not a cosmic tyrant or a god of war, but Starro, a towering starfish that lumbered through city streets like a refugee from a Toho backlot.

Peacemaker doubled down with its grotesque alien cow, and by the middle of season 2 Gunn has once again staged a full kaiju showdown as the show’s crescendo.

This isn’t no passing quirk, it’s a fixation that defines his vision of what superhero storytelling should look like when blown to monstrous proportions. And what is behind that?

Starro and the Kaiju opening act of the DCU

When James Gunn took over The Suicide Squad, many expected another grim ensemble piece in the style of its predecessor. Instead, he cracked open the archive and pulled out Starro the Conqueror, a villain that had been mocked for decades as too outlandish to survive modern adaptation.

James Gunn leaned into the absurdity, scaling the creature to kaiju size and unleashing it on Corto Maltese with practical flourishes that echoed Japanese monster films. The battle was more than just a fight against a giant starfish; it was an homage to decades of cinema where colossal beings became metaphors for fear, trauma, and resistance.

James Gunn made no attempt to disguise the influence, transforming a villain once dismissed as laughable into the DCU’s first true kaiju statement piece.

The alien cow and grotesque scale of Peacemaker Season 1

James Gunn followed Starro with a creature that might have been even stranger: the alien cow in Peacemaker. Slime-covered and pulsating, the cow wasn’t just another monster-of-the-week, it was the narrative lynchpin for the Butterflies’ invasion, a grotesque machine of survival that warped the story into body horror territory.

Again, James Gunn reached for scale. The cow was a looming presence, a reminder that his worlds are never limited to masked vigilantes and corrupt politicians. They are always on the verge of tipping into kaiju territory, where threats take on the size and texture of nightmares.

Peacemaker Season 2 final moments: The full Kaiju arrives

By the time Peacemaker reached its second season final episodes, James Gunn had made his intention undeniable. A giant monster, full kaiju in form and execution, reminiscent from the Superman movie, stormed onto the screen as the climax, having been defeated by the Top Trio on the other side.

It wasn’t subtle neither allegorical in the background. It was the headline of episode 5 of Peacemaker, the final exclamation point that proved James Gunn can’t resist ending his stories with something immense and impossible to ignore. If Starro was a surprise and the cow a grotesque twist, the return of the kaiju in season 2 of Peacemaker is confirmation: this is Gunn’s signature. He wants his characters to stand small against creatures so big they warp the frame itself. And/or stand tall against them after they have been defeated, right?

From cult monsters to mainstream superheroes

The roots of this obsession stretch back to James Gunn’s beginnings in cinema. His years at Troma, the notorious B-movie factory, were filled with cheap monsters, rubber suits, and gleeful excess. That training ground taught him not to fear absurdity but to elevate it, to see creatures of improbable design as opportunities rather than embarrassments.

When James Gunn transitioned to the mainstream, he carried that DNA with him. The same man who once wrote for Tromeo and Juliet is now staging blockbuster superhero tales, but the monsters remain, only bigger, louder, and layered with meaning.

Why Kaiju fit Gunn’s mix of horror and comedy

Kaiju in James Gunn’s hands are never purely terrifying. They are grotesque and absurd all at once, collapsing the boundary between horror and comedy. Starro, with its cyclopean eye and floppy limbs, was both nightmare fuel and a punchline. The cow in Peacemaker inspired disgust but also disbelief. What kind of mind invents this?

James Gunn uses kaiju to amplify the tonal clash he thrives on. His creatures are deadly serious within the narrative, yet ludicrous enough that audiences can’t help but laugh nervously. That tension between awe and ridicule is exactly where James Gunn likes to keep his viewers.

The proof of obsession

It’s not a stretch to call James Gunn obsessed with kaiju, because the record spells it out. Critics have written flatly that “Gunn has been obsessed with the genre since he was a kid,” and the evidence piles up in his own words.

In one interview, he explained,

“I love the kaiju movies. I love old Hong Kong action films… There’s a lot of bits of Asian cinema that have influenced me more than most American cinema.”

That isn’t a casual remark, it’s a declaration of taste that runs deeper than nostalgia. He singles out Kamen Rider, insisting,

“Do I like Kamen Rider? I don’t just like it—I love it!”

and acknowledging that

“the aesthetic has influenced me a lot.”

Those aesthetics—rubber suits, city-crushing monsters, the mix of absurdity and awe—are precisely what resurface when he pulls Starro out of the archives for The Suicide Squad or drops a grotesque alien cow into Peacemaker.

Even when he moves into the most mainstream project of his career, he can’t shake the genre. Talking about Superman, Gunn openly said,

“I tried to fuse elements like giant monsters, robots, flying dogs…”

and at CinemaCon, he doubled down:

“We have robots and monster babies and giant kaiju and all of that stuff.”

His admiration for Godzilla Minus One reveals the framework behind the fixation:

“My goal was to make a film like Godzilla Minus One, which depicted Godzilla but also had great human drama. There is a human story at the root. The relationship between Clark Kent and Lois Lane, and Lex Luthor is the core of the work.”

That marriage of monstrous excess with human-scale drama is the blueprint he keeps returning to.

What makes it an obsession rather than a preference is the consistency. It’s there in his earliest work at Troma, a training ground of rubber monsters and gore, and it’s there now at the top of the DCU, where kaiju aren’t guest appearances but thematic anchors.

James Gunn builds around the genre, fusing his love of Japanese tokusatsu into the DNA of American superhero storytelling. Every time a giant creature crashes into his universe, it’s not an accident: it’s Gunn replaying the films that shaped him, repeatedly proving that the kid who once adored Ultraman never really grew out of it.

The symbolic weight of giant creatures

Kaiju are never only monsters. They are vessels for collective fears and cultural anxieties. In postwar Japan, they embodied nuclear trauma and technological dread.

In James Gunn’s hands, however, they mutate into allegories for corruption, authoritarian control, and ecological collapse. Starro’s spores that enslave human minds were a direct jab at imperialist domination. The alien cow embodied grotesque consumption, turning bodies into commodities.

These kaiju hammer home the idea that the problems facing James Gunn's characters are always larger than life, so immense they can’t be fought without a blend of absurdity and grit. He uses these creatures to insist that power itself is monstrous, and that the fight against it will always feel impossible.

Monsters as DCU brand

What began as a creative flourish has become a brand signature. The DCU under James Gunn is shaping up to be a playground where kaiju stride alongside capes and masks. It’s an aesthetic choice and a thematic commitment.

By continually bringing in creatures of impossible scale, James Gunn is differentiating his universe from Marvel’s polished formula. Where the MCU leans on cosmic beings and multiversal crises, the DCU under Gunn is being built on a foundation of monsters, a world where grotesque excess collides with biting satire.

Why giant monsters keep crashing into James Gunn's DCU

The pattern is clear. Gunn doesn’t sprinkle kaiju into his work as Easter eggs; he builds entire climaxes around them. He can’t tell a story without the shadow of a giant looming somewhere behind the frame. It’s his way of reconciling the influences he loves—Japanese tokusatsu, Hong Kong action, American B-movies—with the superhero myths he now commands.

That’s why giant monsters keep crashing into his DCU: because for James Gunn, they aren’t intrusions. They’re the purest expression of his imagination, the living proof that his obsession is not a phase but the defining rhythm of his storytelling.