‘Creature Commandos’ Is a ‘Soft Intro’ to the New DC Universe, Says James Gunn: ‘We Can Make Something That’s Violent and Sexual’
In mid-2022, executives from what was then called HBO Max approached James Gunn about doing another series adapted from DC Comics, following his hit “Peacemaker.” His first idea: an animated show loosely based on the DC Comics characters known as the Creature Commandos, i.e. group of monsters thrown together into a black ops team tasked with taking out their enemy by any means necessary. He wrote the seven-episode first season over a few weeks on spec — and then Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav hired Gunn and “Peacemaker” executive producer Peter Safran to run DC Studios and relaunch the DC Universe.
“And I said, ‘Oh, I know what I can greenlight!’” Gunn says with a laugh.
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Two years later, the merrily TV-MA series “Creature Commandos,” debuting on Max on Dec. 5, is serving as a kind of appetizer for the new DCU, before Gunn’s feature film “Superman” provides the main course when it premieres in July 2025. As the studio co-chief, Gunn sees the series as a way to establish both his overall creative philosophy for the DCU and how he intends to build out its wider storytelling landscape.
“I just liked the idea of a soft intro to our universe in which metahumans exist, monsters exist, magic exists and incredibly complicated political situations exist,” Gunn says. “And we see what the world of the DCU is through an animated perspective where it costs as much to create a battlefield as it does to create a kitchen — well, not exactly, but not as dissimilar as it would be in a film.”
Working in animation also afforded Gunn the freedom to make the show as violent and sexual as anything he’s made in live action — for example, Dr. Phosphorus (voiced by Alan Tudyk) thinks nothing of using his radioactive skin to melt the face off of his enemies, and multiple characters disrobe for bouts of enthusiastic intercourse. But Gunn cautions that this kind of frisky boundary-pushing won’t be a part of every DC Studios project.
“One of the main things I want to establish is that you can do anything at DC Studios,” he says. “We can make complete family fare. We can make something that’s for general audiences, like ‘Superman.’ We can make something that’s violent and sexual, like this — which I didn’t think was that violent and sexual; ‘Peacemaker’ is both more violent and more sexual — but I want every project to have its own voice. It isn’t about creating a world in which everything is all sex and violence. It’s about creating a world in which we can tell the story about, you know, one type of character in different genres.”
To that end, Gunn and executive producer Dean Lorey assembled their cast — which includes Indira Varma as The Bride; Zo? Chao as Nina Mazursky, an amphibious scientist; and Sean Gunn as G.I. Robot, a WWII-era, Nazi-killing android — with the intention that the actors would play their roles in live action as well, should they be needed for another DCU production. The show is already doing that in reverse: Sean Gunn is also voicing Weasel, the human-sized furry mammal he first played in James Gunn’s 2021 live-action film “The Suicide Squad”; Viola Davis is reprising her performance as Amanda Waller from that film and “Peacemaker,” along with Steve Agee as his “Peacemaker” character John Economos.
For most of the new cast, the potential for playing their roles in live action is, at this point, just that.
“It’s not contractual,” says Tudyk with a chuckle. “It would be neat!”
“I don’t want to get too excited about it,” adds Chao, “because I’m already just excited to be involved in the animated version. I could still eff it up, so I’ll believe it when it happens.”
When Gunn first approached David Harbour about playing Eric Frankenstein — an erudite buffoon convinced The Bride will love him, eventually — “we just casually talked about it,” Harbour says. The actor also doesn’t know when, or if, he would embody Frankenstein on camera, let alone whether it would be through makeup, performance capture CGI, or “a little bit of both.” But his face lights up when talking about the possibility.
“There’s such a big universe out there that [Gunn] wants to play with in little stories,” Harbour says. “He says he doesn’t want this big sort of MCU arc. He wants to play more individualized things. But wouldn’t it be fun to see, you know, Frankenstein show up in a Batman movie?”
While the live-action future for the Commandos remains up in the air, one actor, Frank Grillo — who voices Rick Flag Sr., the seasoned military veteran assigned to lead the team — has already reprised his role, in “Superman” and in Season 2 of “Peacemaker,” as the main narrative thread connecting all three projects.
“It was scary and exhilarating at the same time,” Grillo says of the realization that he’d be bringing Flag Sr. to flesh-and-blood life. “[Gunn] did say that the character would resemble me, and then I saw the character and I’m like, I wish I looked like that guy. But then I saw the first four episodes, and I was blown away by how attractive my animated self is.”
Grillo has already run into a tricky logistical hurdle with bringing Flag Sr. to “Peacemaker,” where his character replaces Waller as the head of A.R.G.U.S., the U.S. government agency overseeing the Commandos and other metahuman activity. Because the actor’s Paramount+ series “Tulsa King” has been shooting at the same time, he couldn’t recreate Flag Sr.’s striking grey coif. “Hair has been an issue,” Grillo says. “I wanted my hair to be exactly the way I am in the animation, because I think that is a badass haircut. But because of my other obligation, I couldn’t, so we had to reverse engineer the hair.”
The production strove to make the animation seem “a little more realistic” in general, Lorey says, when compared to recent DC animated shows like “Harley Quinn.” “We wanted to give it a sort of an Eastern European flair, and have a darker, more complex color palette,” he says.
That realism became quite vivid when the animation team began visualizing Gunn’s already evocative descriptions of the action sequences.
“James usually really gets graphic with his visuals,” Agee says. “You can read it and be like, ‘Jesus Christ, this is brutal.’ And then when you see it, you’re like, ‘Holy shit, this is even more brutal than it was on the page.’”
According to Gunn, there was even a point where he wondered whether the animators had gone a bit too far. “Originally, the script was written in such a way that there were definitely moments of violence, but it maybe wasn’t going to be as violent as it ended up, you know?” he says. “The truth is what they were doing was so great, I was like, ‘Oh, let’s just do it.’ It just seemed true to it. I like the mix of the sweetness of some of the moments and the melancholy of these outcasts, and then this horrific violence that we see from time to time. And the sexiness!”
The piece of animation that seems to have surprised Gunn the most didn’t involve any violence, but the decision to create an animated version of him for the opening credits.
“We did it without telling James,” Lorey says, as Gunn, seated next to him, begins to blush. “We were like, I hope he’s not offended!”
“Well, I didn’t say no, but I didn’t want people to think that I told them to put myself in there,” Gunn says, laughing. “My ego was stroked and I was very embarrassed by it. But at the end of the day, I said OK, and it’s in there. So what are you going to do?”
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