With the dust finally having fully settled on the DCEU, the first chapter in James Gunn and Peter Safran's new-look DCU — the "Gods And Monsters" phase — is really starting to take shape. Shooting's wrapped on Gunn's Superman (now with confirmed Krypto The Superdog); Aaron Pierre and Kyle Chandler have been set to play Green Lanterns John Stewart and Hal Jordan in HBO's Lanterns series; and, at this past weekend's New York Comic Con, it was confirmed that the Milly Alcock Supergirl movie will start shooting this coming January. And as if that weren't all exciting enough, we've now got our first full trailer for Gunn's DCU debut Creature Commandos, an all-star adult animated series led by David Harbour, Anya Chalotra, and Maria Bakalova that's essentially The Suicide Squad with added monsters. Check it out below:
Banging needledrops, bursts of ultraviolence, and a rag-tag bunch of misfits with deep-rooted trauma, outcast by a society that only sees them as freaks, coming together for a cause that's bigger than themselves? It's not hard to see what drew Gunn to Task Force M, the black ops team brought together by Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) after Task Force X — aka The Suicide Squad — are outlawed. And honestly, this simultaneously looks right within Gunn's Guardians and Squad wheelhouse whilst also posing something new. Not only are the team here — sorceress Circe (Chalotra), Elsa Lanchester styled The Bride (Indira Varma), radioactive Doctor Phosphorous (Alan Tudyk), Eric Frankenstein (Harbour), amphibious scientist Nina Mazursky (Zoë Chao), and Sean Gunn voiced military android G.I. Robot and Weasel — an eclectic bunch to behold with a wildly varying power set, but in the animated medium Gunn's comic book aesthetic sensibility is really let off the leash in grin-inducing bursts of colour and gratuitous, absurd violence.
The official logline for the show, which also stars Frank Grillo as Rick Flag Sr. and Steve Agee in a Peacemaker role reprisal as tech guy Economos, reads as follows: “Creature Commandos tracks a secret team of incarcerated monsters recruited for missions deemed too dangerous for humans. When all else fails… they’re your last, worst option."
Written and produced by Gunn himself, packing a killer voice cast, and coming with the promise that many of these characters will be crossing mediums in the future for live-action outings in the DCU, Creature Commandos is gearing up to be quite the kick-off to a new era in DC storytelling on the big- and small-screen. And we can look forward to seeing Gunn's monstrous crew come alive (ALIVE!!!) on our screens when the 7-episode series premieres on Max on 5 December stateside, and presumably not too long after here in the UK.