James Gunn baffled over Fortnite’s Peacemaker dance emote controversy

At the end of September, news emerged that Epic Games was canceling Fortnite The character's emotion is taken from James Gunn's dance intro. Peacemaker Season 2 due to concerns that the choreography perhaps meant to evoke a swastika. This concern stemmed from the moment in the series when John Cena's character learned that in the alternate dimension he was exploring, The Nazis were victorious in World War IIleading to a civilization built around white supremacy. The emotion was there after all republished in modified form.

Steve Agee, who played sad tech wizard John Economos in PeacemakerPolygon reports that Co-CEO of DC Studios Gunn, writer and director PeacemakerMarvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy films and 2025 Supermanwas confused by anxiety about the dance.

“I talked to James about this about a week and a half ago,” Agee said. “We were texting and he was like, 'This is so confusing to me.' Charissa Barton, our choreographer, never had a script. She didn't know that there were Nazis involved when she created a dance routine this season. So any resemblance to a swastika in this dance is purely coincidental.”

Agee compared the season two intro, set to Foxy Shazam's “Oh Lord”, to similarly stylized season one opening dance sequencewhich has become a social media phenomenon and revived the career of the Norwegian band WigWam.

“If you look at our dance moves in the first season, they were pretty weird,” Agee said. “These aren't typical Broadway dance moves—they're just weird body positions and movements. [Season 2’s intro sequence] there was just something more. But Charissa didn't have access to the scripts—she saw the episodes for the first time as they aired. I'm pretty sure this was the first time Charissa knew what was going on on the show.”

Agee says the second season's opening dance was a much more involved project than the original version.

“We shot it in two days, whereas we shot the first dance number in one day,” he said. “We filmed the first season in this small school gymnasium, but [for season 2, we were] on a large sound stage in Trilit Studioswith a massive lighting system and LED panel behind us. It was a much bigger deal. But if you look at it, it still seems similar to the dance number from the first season in terms of learning it and filming it.”

Barton's process involved teaching each group of actors their small part of the dance—”it's literally a four-second segment where we dance, and then it goes to someone else”—and giving them each individual rehearsal tape.

“So we learned that section and she videotaped you on her phone and sent you home with the video to hopefully rehearse,” Agee laughs. “Although I think a lot of us probably haven’t rehearsed much.”

However, he found the second season's dance number a little more natural than the first season's opening. “They’re both weird songs that are fun to dance to,” he said. “Foxy's 'Oh Lord' is probably easier because it has more of a pop feel to it and WigWam has a little more of a rock feel to it. But yeah, I'm not a dancer, so I found them both difficult, and it's not the song. It's just because I find it hard to dance.”

Both seasons Peacemaker streaming now on HBO Max.