In January 2023, James Gunn and Peter Safran, co-chairmen and co-CEOs of DC Studios, unveiled their eight- to 10-year plan for the new DC Universe. They teased a robust slate of films and TV shows, with stories set to center on some of the brand’s most famous superheroes—such as Superman and Batman—as well as lesser-known characters like Booster Gold and the Authority. Since then, DC Studios has been in something of a limbo period, biding its time before the big relaunch by releasing leftover projects from the Snyderverse and “Elseworlds” titles that exist outside of the continuity of the main DCU and Gunn’s direct creative control. The results have been wildly mixed, including some colossal box office flops and one outstanding HBO series. But Gunn and Safran’s DCU is now officially underway, as Creature Commandos becomes the unlikely project to usher in DC’s new era.
On Thursday, the first two episodes of Creature Commandos premiered on Max. The adult animated TV show boasts Dean Lorey (Harley Quinn, Kite Man: Hell Yeah!) as showrunner, with all seven of its episodes written by Gunn himself. It may seem a little odd that Gunn would choose the lower stakes (and lower budget) of an animated series for his grand reopening of the DCU, but as the veteran filmmaker and fledgling studio executive recently told The Hollywood Reporter, it was never his intention for Creature Commandos to bat first.
“The main thing is that it was already written,” Gunn said with a laugh. “HBO Max asked me to do another show after the success of Peacemaker, but I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do. Committing to a TV show is a big deal, so I just started playing with different ideas, and then I started writing Creature Commandos on spec. I wrote all seven episodes in a few weeks, and then right around the time that I was finishing those scripts, I got hired as the co-head of DC Studios.”
Even if it wasn’t by design, Creature Commandos now bears the honor (and burden) of serving as the first official project in the rebooted DCU, providing viewers with the chance to see Gunn’s vision begin to take shape at last. And while it is an entertaining series that leans into the filmmaker’s distinctive strengths as a writer, Creature Commandos feels like little more than an appetizer to hold fans over until the main course arrives in the form of Superman next summer.
Creature Commandos is effectively a spinoff of The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker. As such, it features several characters and plot points that have carried over from those two projects, which Gunn created for DC before he was entrusted to help run the whole studio in October 2022. Within the opening minutes of the series premiere, A.R.G.U.S. leader Amanda Waller (voiced by Viola Davis, reprising her role) and General Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo) discuss just about everything you’d need to know from the events of The Suicide Squad—from Colonel Rick Flag Jr.’s (Joel Kinnaman) heroic death to Weasel’s (Sean Gunn) remarkable survival skills—and the conclusion of Peacemaker to tee off the new series.
“I thought Congress put a stop to all Task Force X activities since your daughter outed you?” Flag asks Waller as she brings him to a wing of A.R.G.U.S. headquarters ominously called the “Non-Human Internment Division.”
“Technically, Congress said A.R.G.U.S. can’t use incarcerated human beings as mission operatives any longer,” Waller replies. “But what about beings that aren’t human?”
Because Waller’s daughter Leota Adebayo (Danielle Brooks) publicly exposed Project Butterfly and Task Force X—including her mother’s role in leading them—at the end of Peacemaker, Task Force X no longer exists. In its place is Task Force M, otherwise known as the Creature Commandos, a new black ops team composed of incarcerated “monsters,” as opposed to humans.
The series premiere, “The Collywobbles,” serves as an introduction to Rick Flag Sr. and his newly-formed squad: the Bride of Frankenstein (Indira Varma), the radioactive Doctor Phosphorus (Alan Tudyk), the amphibious scientist Nina Mazursky (Zoë Chao), and Weasel and the Nazi-killing G.I. Robot (both voiced by Sean Gunn). Their first mission is to protect the princess of Pokolistan, Ilana Rostovic (Maria Bakalova), from a rogue Amazonian sorceress named Circe (Anya Chalotra) and her forces. Between the premiere and its follow-up, “The Tourmaline Necklace,” the opening pair of episodes quickly establish the quirky tone of the series, as well as the structure that Creature Commandos follows in the final five episodes of its first season. (All seven episodes were sent to critics to screen in advance.)
From the second episode on, Creature Commandos uses each of its installments to spotlight a major character and their origin story through a series of flashbacks. “The Tourmaline Necklace” focuses on the Bride, revealing that the mad scientist Victor Frankenstein (Peter Serafinowicz) created her to be the companion to his original creation, Eric Frankenstein (David Harbour), and that she rejected the monster’s love in the many years to follow.
Gunn’s imprint is all over Creature Commandos. What with the gratuitous violence, crude humor, and healthy dose of melodrama, the series is very familiar territory for the filmmaker. Not unlike The Suicide Squad or even Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies in the MCU, Creature Commandos is really a story about misunderstood outcasts finding a family in each other.
“I’m used to dealing with oddballs and irregular types and weirdos,” Gunn told Entertainment Weekly. “That’s what Guardians is, and Creature Commandos is kind of like Guardians without the sentimentality.”
These similarities aren’t such a terrible thing, because these familiar qualities jell well in a project that features its fair share of fun action sequences, laughs, and the kind of emotional, character-driven storytelling that Gunn excels at. The problem is that Creature Commandos feels a little too derivative of the filmmaker’s previous works to really stand on its own. And with only seven episodes to work with, none of which exceed even 30 minutes, there just isn’t enough narrative runway for the show to fully flesh out its core group of characters, tell an impactful story, or introduce a memorable villain.
When it comes to the bigger picture of the DCU, these shortcomings may not matter all that much in the end. After all, Creature Commandos is a lower-stakes animated series, and many of its characters will likely reemerge in bigger live-action projects. As Gunn stated back in January 2023 when sharing his and Safran’s plans, “Something that we’re gonna do that’s a little bit different at DC is we’re gonna have characters move into animation, out of animation, usually having the same actor play their voice as who plays them in live action.”
Davis’s Amanda Waller, for one, is getting her own live-action series, which Gunn recently confirmed is still in development. And Grillo’s Rick Flag Sr. is also set to return in both the second season of Peacemaker and Superman, with Grillo retaining the role in the character’s transition to live action. So whether it’s Harbour’s Frankenstein, Varma’s Bride, or some other Creature Commando, any of these characters could make the jump to the big screen or another Max series to continue arcs that may just be beginning on the animated show.
Creature Commandos may not be a satiating meal on its own, as Batman: Caped Crusader was earlier this year. Even Gunn has likened his first animated project to a mere appetizer for fans before the first of the DCU’s main courses is served when the Man of Steel returns in the summer. “Superman is the true start of everything, it’s a humongous epic,” Gunn told EW. “This is a way for people to just take a little nibble and see what it tastes like. There are a ton of fun references to other DC stuff, a bunch of hints for things that are coming. So I think it’s just an extraordinarily fun way to start.”
Without getting into any spoilers, Creature Commandos features guest appearances from major and minor DC characters alike, while also introducing terms like “metahumans” and glimpses into the politics of the world that may prove to be important in future stories. The fact that the series seems designed more to set up the DCU than to serve as its own stand-alone story may be a warning sign that Gunn and Co. could be at risk of getting too caught up in weaving together an interconnected cinematic universe and finding that they’ve deemphasized individual projects, as Marvel Studios often has. But the animated series, which currently holds a stellar 96 percent critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, has enough of its own charm to successfully play its part as a prologue to “Gods and Monsters,” the first chapter of the DCU.
