According to series executive producer Dean Lorey, DC Studios’ Creature Commandos series will ring very familiar to anyone who has watched showrunner James Gunn’s previous live-action Suicide Squad film.
Lorey drew this comparison between the two Gunn-helmed, team-centric DC projects while speaking to TheWrap‘s Kayla Cobb during the recent 2024 Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour.
Asked by Cobb if he could provide any insight into the Commandos’ upcoming sortie, the EP asserted, “[Creature Commandos] is going to be the first expression of James Gunn’s DC Universe. We’re considering that canon, and I think it expresses [Gunn’s] perspective, tonally, on where he wants the universe to go.”
To this end, Lorey then admitted that the series’ overall premise of ‘a rag-tag team of horror-themed metahumans undertaking black ops missions for the government’ would feel immediately familiar to anyone who saw his aforementioned take on Task Force X.
“[It’s] nothing new,” concluded the EP. “It’s Suicide Squad. He’s done it. People aren’t going to be surprised by what it is, but I think they’ll be really encouraged to see how completely it’s going to inform this new version of the DCU, which I’m very excited about.”
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Notably, this is not the first time that a member of Creature Commandos‘ cast and crew has teased the series’ direction as ‘quintessentially Gunn’.
Pressed for his thoughts on the project’s overall quality during a panel appearance at the 2024 Boston Fan Expo, series Doctor Phosphorous voice actor Alan Tudyk declared, “When I read it, it was the best thing I had read in so long, and it was moving. And that is what James Gunn does so well. I can’t wait for people to see it. I’ve now seen some of it and it looks really great.”
“It’s so good,” he added. “I’m personally, I realized I’m the perfect audience for him. He does that thing that Joss Whedon did so well where it is…There’s humor in everything. So you have these moving touching stories about these extraordinary characters who can sometimes be meta humans and sometimes just be you know, just interesting people around meta humans, and robots, and animals.”
“He’s funny, and somehow it’s the way in for me to get to some deeper feelings as well,” Tudyk further praised. “Like when something’s making you laugh and then it pulls the rug out from under you,” he concluded. “Like, maybe some people have seen Serenity. When the rug gets pulled out of you. Sometimes it comes in the form of a huge telephone pole-sized stake through all of your major organs because that’s big, big stake. Anyway, James does that.”
Presently, Creature Commandos is set to start haunting MAX – and in doing so kick off Gunn and his co-studio head Peter Safran’s reboot of the DCU – this December.
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