It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… a group of monsters stopping international crises at the behest of the American government? The highly anticipated DC Universe, James Gunn and Peter Safran’s attempt to reboot the superhero franchise, will truly begin with Gunn’s Superman, which feels like a natural starting point — the Man of Steel, after all, is the very first superhero. But the DCU is getting off to a much more unlikely start with a show about a group of inhuman supervillains forcibly compelled by Amanda Waller (Viola Davis, reprising her role from The Suicide Squad) to work off-the-books.
Creature Commandos, created and written by James Gunn, is the first official DCU project, preceding Superman by nearly a year. So, does it set the tone for the much-anticipated DCU? Not really.
“It's one of many tones,” executive producer and showrunner Dean Lorey tells Inverse. “But it's a really good reflection of what James does great. It's got a lot of action. It's got a lot of heart and comedy. So it's a nice mix of all those things [that] will inform other projects, but they'll tonally be very different.”
“It is really just expanding the universe.”
Creature Commandos occupies a strange place between the DCU and the old DC Extended Universe, spearheaded by Zack Snyder. Creature Commandos’ team of misfit monsters is led by Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo), who alludes to his son, Rick Flag Jr. (Joel Kinnaman in both Suicide Squad movies), having recently died, which happens during the technically non-canon events of The Suicide Squad. And Amanda Waller’s go-to tech guy, John Economos (Steve Agee), shows up with a cane, having sustained an injury in the Season 1 finale of The Suicide Squad spinoff, Peacemaker, which has also been wiped off the slate.
So what’s canon and what isn’t? Gunn has spoken about picking and choosing what to bring over from the DCEU, including Davis’ Waller and various Peacemaker characters, but everything else is “different manifestations of these same characters and different realities.” Agee has a more meta explanation.
“I think it is really just expanding the universe,” Agee tells Inverse. “When we did Season 1 of Peacemaker, it was just expanding the world beyond Superman and Batman. Now here's these characters in a world where Superman exists. As you're watching Peacemaker, you can go, ‘Superman is out there saving the world somewhere.’ And now even though it's animated, you're like, ‘This is a world where there was a Frankenstein, Weasel is there again.’ It's really just making the world bigger and giving James more options for stories.”
Lorey gives a much more cryptic answer on what is or isn’t canon.
“James was very clear from the start that Creature Commandos was canon,” he says. “I don't know all his plans for the DCU, he does. So he was very careful as we went through all of this to give us details that I assume are important to him for future projects. We really just respected that.”
For Grillo, all that matters canonically is the emotional impact events have on his character. Rick Flag Sr. is also set to appear in Superman and Peacemaker Season 2 (Grillo has called his character the Nick Fury of the DCU), the latter of which will have him as an “integral part” of the show. He’s “a force to be reckoned with,” Grillo tells Inverse.
Regardless of whether it’s canon that Joel Kinnaman played Grillo’s son (the 14-year difference between the two actors does start to beggar belief), it’s the loss of Rick Flag Jr. that’s important to Grillo. “The death of a child, the murder of a child, even an adult child, is catastrophic in affecting one's behavior,” Grillo says. “That's kind of the through line for this guy. And I think that indicates a lot of why he does things.”
The Flags, Amanda Waller, and John Economos aren’t the only connecting threads between the new and old DCU, as Sean Gunn returns to voice Weasel after playing him in mo-cap in The Suicide Squad. Learning more about what makes Weasel tick appealed to Gunn, who has appeared in nearly every ragtag superhero team that his brother James Gunn has directed, including the MCU’s Guardians of the Galaxy. The similarities between the Creature Commandos, the Suicide Squad, and the Guardians don’t escape Sean Gunn, but he sees the new DC show simply as a chance to tell a “cool new story.”
“Obviously my brother wrote them both, so there's a little bit of a cohesion between the two of them,” Gunn, who also voices GI Robot, tells Inverse. “But Creature Commandos is very different from Suicide Squad. It's extremely different from Guardians of the Galaxy, and I'm excited for people to see it.”
On the other side of the cast are the DCU newcomers, all of whom have the opportunity to eventually play their characters in live-action: Zoe Chao as amphibious scientist Nina Mazursky, David Harbour as Eric Frankenstein, Alan Tudyk as Doctor Phosphorus, and Indira Varma as the Bride. That dual casting for both animation and live-action was a detail Lorey and his collaborators paid special attention to.
“Creature Commandos is very different from Suicide Squad. It's extremely different from Guardians of the Galaxy.”
“We were casting not just for the animated show, but potentially a live-action movie or show,” Lorey says. “We did have to take all that into account, so it was a little more complicated. But at the end of the day, it had to work for animation first. We really did only select people that we thought would kill it on the animation side, and they did.”
While Grillo is the only DCU newcomer confirmed to be appearing in future projects, everyone else is ready for the call to put on their super-suit (or gills). “When they told me these characters will just be a part of this universe, I was like, ‘Wow, so I could show up in a Batman movie or something,’” David Harbour jokes to Inverse. Zoe Chao, who voices Nina Mazursky, says she “would be honored to be Nina in a live-action rendition of Creature Commandos. I am being absolutely honest with you. I know nothing, and if I did know anything, I wouldn't say it!”
