Peacemaker

In The Suicide Squad (2021), Chris is part of the team Amanda Waller sends to the island of Corto Maltese to destroy Jotunheim, the Project Starfish lab where Starro is held. He spends much of the mission competing with Bloodsport over who kills with more style, and the two end up massacring a camp of rebels by mistake.

Waller gives him a secret order: make the evidence that the U.S. funded the Starro experiments disappear. When Rick Flag decides to take the files to the press, Chris kills him. Bloodsport answers with a bullet to Peacemaker's neck, and he's left behind under the rubble. In the post-credits scene, he turns up alive in a hospital, getting a visit from two of Waller's agents.

Peacemaker season 1 (2022) opens with Chris leaving the hospital. Instead of going back to prison, he joins the Project Butterfly team, led by Clemson Murn and made up of Emilia Harcourt, John Economos, and Leota Adebayo. The mission is to hunt the Butterflies, aliens that crawl inside human bodies and take control.

Along the way come Vigilante, a friend with zero sense of limits, and Eagly, Chris's pet eagle. Peacemaker's helmets, loaded with strange functions, were built by his father, Auggie Smith, a racist who operates as the villain White Dragon. When a murder Chris committed gets pinned on Auggie, his father goes to jail and things between them get even worse. Adebayo discovers that Murn is a Butterfly, but one who's on humanity's side.

The show slowly reveals Chris's trauma. As kids, his father forced him and his older brother, Keith, to fight each other. In one of those fights, Chris accidentally killed Keith, and Auggie never let him forget it.

In episode 7, Auggie, now out of jail, comes after his son in the White Dragon armor, and Chris kills him. In the season finale, the team destroys the Cow, the Butterflies' food source. Adebayo tells the press everything her mother, Amanda Waller, has done. Chris ends the season with his friends nearby, but still seeing his father's ghost.

Chris makes a quick appearance in Superman (2025). With the hero at his lowest with the public, Peacemaker goes on a TV show and takes the chance to bash Superman.

Peacemaker season 2 (2025) opens with Chris failing his tryout for the Justice Gang, humiliated by Guy Gardner, Hawkgirl, and Maxwell Lord. In the house that belonged to his father, he finds a door in the Quantum Unfolding Chamber that leads to another dimension. There, Auggie is a beloved hero, Keith is alive, and that world's Peacemaker is adored by everyone. In episode 1, the two Chrises fight and the other one dies in his arms.

The problem is Rick Flag Sr., now head of A.R.G.U.S. and the father of the Rick Flag that Chris killed in Corto Maltese. Flag hunts Chris and the portal, and even makes a deal with Lex Luthor to track both. Tired of being hated, Chris decides to move to the other world for good and brings his friends. Only then do they realize that Earth is ruled by Nazis. Adrian kills the alternate Auggie, Keith is badly hurt, and a shattered Chris goes back with the group to his own dimension and hands the device over to A.R.G.U.S.

In the last episode, A.R.G.U.S. discovers several more dimensions and picks one of them, Salvation, to serve as a prison for metahumans. Harcourt and Bordeaux quit. Chris and Harcourt finally start dating, and the group founds its own agency, Checkmate.

The calm doesn't last. A.R.G.U.S. agents kidnap Chris, and Flag Sr. shoves him through the door to Salvation and shuts it. Alone, Chris hears something roar in the forest. That's where the season ends.

Peacemaker was created by Joe Gill and Pat Boyette for Charlton Comics and debuted in Fightin' 5 #40 in 1966. DC bought the Charlton characters in the 1980s. Alan Moore wanted to use him in Watchmen, but DC said no, and he became the inspiration for the Comedian. In DC's version, Christopher Smith is the son of a Nazi officer and believes ghosts talk to him through his helmet.