When Creature Commandos arrives in December, available to all DC fans with a Max subscription, it will mark James Gunn’s return to the world that he established in both The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker. At the same time, this will be the official launch of a DC cinematic universe, or DCU, that will go on to include such upcoming DC projects as Gunn’s 2025 Superman movie, Peacemaker Season 2, Supergirl, and the television series Lanterns. Handing Gunn the creative baton makes a lot of sense for DC and Warner Bros. He has a proven track record for both Marvel and DC. But his choice of a team to lead the charge had a few people scratching their heads… including the creatives working on the show.
Creature Commandos loosely adapts an existing DC comic, one that has been around for decades. This incarnation centers on a team of monsters who are recruited by Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) to complete a difficult mission that puts the entire squad in danger. So it’s similar to The Suicide Squad, only it relies on creatures instead of villains. This allowed writer James Gunn and his chosen showrunner, Dean Lorey (Harley Quinn), to assemble the rag-tag team of their choice, and they settled on Weasel (Sean Gunn), The Bride (Indira Varma), Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo), Nina Mazursky (Zoe Chao) and more. It is a motley, loveable crew.
Ahead of the debut of Creature Commandos – which will drop its first two episodes on Thursday, December 5 – showrunner Dean Lorey sat down with CinemaBlend to discuss the team, and his collaborations with James Gunn on this anticipated show. And Lorey told us that there were two characters in the ensemble that initially concerned him. As Lorey explained:
Actually G.I. Robot and Frankenstein were the two characters that, before we started recording them, I really didn't have a sense of how they would sound like. Because they’re such flexible – like, G.I. Robot. How much of a robot do you play? How Roboty is it? And Frankenstein, I didn't have a clue. Because he's written kind of as an intellectual. A stalker. A horrible guy! But intellectual.
It can be a little difficult to wrap your brain around the characters in Creature Commandos. Similar to the Suicide Squad, they are prisoners in Belle Reve, bending to the will of the forceful Amanda Waller. And they are expendable. But James Gunn knows better than most how to write misfit characters, and how to gel them together into a team. Just look at the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise he built over at Marvel Studios, from a property very few were aware of before those movies.
As with Guardians, the success of Creature Commandos comes down to casting. Frank Grillo is the right tough-as-nails leader to play RIck Flag Sr. Sean Gunn brings heart and humor to both G.I. Robot and Weasel. But the MVP of the show, without question, is David Harbour as the voice of Frankenstein. Speaking about his performance, Dean Lorey told CinemaBlend:
David Harbour came in, he just had it from the start. There was never… It was just like, ‘Oh, obviously it's this.’ That is, to me, how you know when something is working, when it's just, you hear it and you're just like, ‘Oh, well, yeah. It couldn't be anything else.’
You will hear a lot more about Creature Commandos as we inch toward its debut on December 5. On that day, we’ll get the first two of seven episodes, and meet the new team that will begin James Gunn and Peter Safran’s expanding universe based on DC properties. It’s an exciting time to be a fan of DC storytelling, so get in on the ground floor.
