CREATURE COMMANDOS: What Is It, Is It Good, And Why Does It Exist?

James Gunn and Peter Safran have been handed the keys to the DC Universe on film and television. Most people probably haven’t been keeping up with the drama at Warner Bros., and their first exposure to Gunn and Safran’s new DC Universe will likely be Superman: Legacy this summer. But in 2024, the duo announced the DC Universe’s new slate of movies and television projects, tilted “Chapter One: Gods and Monsters” — and at the front of the lineup is an inauspicious little show titled Creature Commandos. What is it, should you watch it, and more importantly, why does this show exist?

What Is Creature Commandos?

Creature Commandos is a Max-exclusive streaming series. It’s seven episodes long, and each episode is a bite-sized 20 minutes or so. The show is mostly a follow-up to Gunn’s The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker season one, and stop me if you’ve heard this before: It follows a rag-tag group of criminals and supervillains tasked by shady government strings-puller Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) to infiltrate a foreign country and stop a bigger, badder villain from destroying the world. It’s basically the same plot as The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker. This time, the criminals are a bunch of monsters locked up in prison, they’re invading the fictional Eastern European nation of Pokolistan, and they’re led by a soldier named Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo). He’s the father of Joel Kinnaman’s character from the other Suicide Squad movies. It’s all very unnecessarily confusing.

The series is an odd choice as the first official entry in the new DC Universe. Apparently, the show is cast such that these characters can later appear in live action played by the same actors, which is cool. But it’s unclear at this point when they’ll show up in a DC film. The show itself is already a hard sell to casual audiences — animated shows for adults always are — and as a result, Creature Commandos mostly seems made for the fans.

DC’s animated projects have a strong following but not an enormous audience. Harley Quinn, a five-season animated Max-exclusive comedy series, only has 40,000 user ratings on IMDb. Compare that to the 145,000 ratings for Peacemaker, which only has one season so far and is also Max-exclusive. A spin-off show to Harley Quinn, titled Kite Man: Hell Yeah!, only has 2,200 ratings. Compared to those, Creature Commandos is a bit of a nonstarter, with only 13,000 ratings on the site. That’s low compared to much more successful numbers for other big franchise-linked shows from 2024 like Skeleton Crew (24,000 ratings), Dune: Prophecy (41,000 ratings), and Marvel’s beloved animated show X-Men: ’97 (also 41,000).

As far as IMDb can be a credible source of audience interest, the numbers show that Creature Commandos is a series only for big DC fans. It feels as though nobody is talking about the show, either. The series seems to have generated very little noise outside of the DC fandom, which makes it a mystery why this was the first cab off the rank for DC Studios’ new cinematic universe.

Is Creature Commandos Any Good?

Creature Commandos is nothing you haven’t seen before. James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies and all of his DC projects to date involve scrappy teams of somewhat selfish, proudly despicable, and otherwise morally grey characters doing superhero stuff. While that feels like the right approach for this colorful, tongue-in-cheek iteration of the C-list DC Comics monster squad, it also feels samey. As a project that’s announcing Gunn’s new vision for the DC Universe, Creature Commandos feels like a tired formula rather than a bold new concept. And that’s a problem.

James Gunn is a good storyteller. He clearly loves his characters and wants to not just show them use their superpowers and do cool things, but he wants to also open them up and understand them, show us their motivations and their fears. Those impulses as a writer helped right the ship on The Suicide Squad, taking the worst DC film by a country mile and resurrecting it as not just a well-made, intelligent R-rated action-comedy, but as a franchise-starter in its own right. But Creature Commandos has to not only start a franchise, but start a universe — and it’s underwhelming on both counts.

The characters are well-chosen, for the most part. The Bride (Indira Varma) is essentially the Bride of Frankenstein but she dual-wields pistols and can punch through solid steel. She’s a slick, stylish badass and misanthropic leader — a wonderful character to lead the show. Weasel (Sean Gunn), who’s literally just a man-sized weasel thing that can’t speak English, is back on the team from The Suicide Squad, and he mostly just licks his genitals and looks clueless. He’s perfect. G.I. Robot (also Sean Gunn) is a tin soldier from World War II who fits right in as the team’s walking, flying, Nazi-killing turret. And Doctor Phosphorus (Alan Tudyk) shows that with the right material, even Batman’s least popular, silliest villains can be menacing. Phosphorus, who glows green and is made of radioactive fire, is a joker who can also melt people’s faces off — and like most of the characters in Creature Commandos, both his black humor and his sadistic violence mask a tragic past.

The Bride is an easy standout, as a fierce hand-to-hand combatant who has trouble making friends. She’s kind of drawn as a thirst trap, though, and I got the sense that the animators were hoping the character would get some kind of second life on Tumblr and AO3. But her costume rules, the Bride of Frankenstein hair looks amazing in motion, and I’m really looking forward to seeing Varma in live action rocking that stiff maroon coat. G.I. Robot and Weasel are the only funny characters of the bunch, though, and in a black action-comedy that bumps one of them off fairly quickly, the uneven writing never compensates for that tonal imbalance.

And then there’s Nina Mazursky (Zoë Chao), an aquatic member of the Creature Commandos who wears a fishbowl on her head. The fish-lady is a sweet voice of reason on a team of killers. But her backstory is as hammy as they come, and as great as Chao is as a voice actor, the character gets nothing at all to do. She has no demonstrable skills that make her an asset to the team, and it’s a mystery why she’s there.

Leader Rick Flag Sr. is a gruff but respectable leading man — though the story reveals him to be kind of a stooge who thinks with his penis rather than his brain. The group’s overseer, Amanda Waller, is as strangely written as ever. The shadowy leader of the Creature Commandos was inconsistent, goofy, and self-serious when she was introduced all the way back in Suicide Squad, and for a character who’s supposed to be a “master strategist” in the comics, her live-action counterpart seems to only make bizarre, kneejerk decisions. She’s the kind of person who will order a monarch assassinated on a hunch or put a fish person on the team because, I dunno, they probably swim really well? Maybe this Amanda Waller is someone who failed upward until she reached the top level of security clearance, and now she just runs things. It makes you wonder why such a talented actor as Viola Davis would want to stay on as such a messily written character.

The most disappointing character in the show is David Harbour’s take on Frankenstein’s monster. (Before you ask, of course DC Comics has Frankenstein’s monster as a character.) Gunn reimagines him as a murderous manchild stalker, but that characterization isn’t as interesting or novel as he probably thinks it is. Harbour’s delivery is awful, too — his dialogue is simple-minded, and he speaks lines flatly and without life, like a violent deadpan 8-year-old. His monster has excellent diction — one element this series’ characterization takes directly from Mary Shelley’s novel — but hearing him use that fine vocabulary and erudite speech to make a reference to When Harry Met Sally is just so lame. I feel truly terrible for Harbour, who seems to have been severely misdirected here — this might be one of his worst performances. I hope he redeems himself one day in a live-action version of the character. Or, you know, I hope he gets to play literally anyone more interesting than the 807th take on Frankenstein’s monster.

For the most part, all of these characters are the same at their cores — they each get an overwrought tragic backstory where the saddest possible things happen to them. And most of those backstories are also incredibly, brutally violent. My empathy can only extend so far, though — watching seven tragic backstories in a row will do that to you. Sure, Phosphorus had One Bad Day, but he’s still an evil psycho who melts people’s faces. (Men will literally melt an entire family with their superpowers before going to therapy.) Gunn’s insistence on humanizing these monsters and stripping his characters down to their most traumatic memories goes too far sometimes — in some ways, it feels like we’re still in the same DCU where Zack Snyder said that his Batman would get raped in prison. Violence and tragedy are often mistaken for coolness and depth.

The repetitive structure of the episodes makes them a chore to sit through. Each one unfolds over the course of a few hours or a day while we see one character’s backstory via flashbacks. Each story, though, is so loaded with violence and swearing and tragedy that the show feels like it’s just constantly on full volume. There’s no downtime in Creature Commandos and precious little time to appreciate this team’s dynamics before they’re inevitably killed one by one. The show, like its characters, just never has time to breathe.

Gunn’s worst tendencies as a writer bubble to the surface in Creature Commandos. Whether it’s the forced cultural references in lieu of actual jokes or the same archetypes recycled over and over again, this might be his least successful comic book adaptation. For example, the royal guard of Pokolistan is somehow incredibly technologically advanced — they fire laser guns and fly around with jetpacks — yet the capital city is depicted as a slum with a lavish castle at its center. That’s an interesting idea, except it’s basically the same set-up as Corto Maltese in The Suicide Squad. And the Pokolistan captain of the guard (Julian Kostov), the Princess (Maria Bakalova), and Eric Frankenstein (the monster) are all depicted as jubilant but naïve people who speak very literally and love references to American culture — they’re basically just Drax from the Guardians movies.

The remainder of the show verges on edgelord territory, the kind of visceral but shallow display of blood, sex, and hyperviolence that would make a 13-year-old giddy. Domestic terrorists threaten to rape the princess, that sort of thing. And every action scene is set to Gogol Bordello, which is definitely a strong choice if not necessarily a good one. I’m not 13 anymore, so I found Creature Commandos just kind of tiring, and I don’t really have the stomach to watch another season where rape is casually deployed as a threat, where an Eastern European nation is portrayed as a backward impoverished slum, and where a bunch of innocent people are murdered by supervillains with no greater moral lesson or empathy.

As for the animation, imagine a cross between The Legend of Korra and The Venture Bros, except the fight scenes have none of the slick fluidity of Korra and all of the weird Adult Swim jank of The Venture Bros. The dialogue scenes look great, and the background art is wonderful, but the brutal violence has that sickening low-fidelity look you associate with low-budget late-night animation. DC has had much stronger animated projects than this.

And then there’s the plot itself. The story of Creature Commandos is needlessly convoluted, the sort of plot you need Charlie Day drawing lines with red thread on a corkboard to understand. The interesting bits of worldbuilding that the show sets up early are never paid off — stuff like the clear class divide in Pokolistan and an insurgent group of misogynists called the Sons of Themyscira. Some plot threads, like Frankenstein’s pursuit of the Bride or Rick Flag Sr.’s infatuation with the princess, are never wrapped up in the season at all.

I don’t think it was a good decision to tell a serialized story in only seven episodes. Creature Commandos could have fleshed out Gunn and Safran’s new DC Universe better — and better served its characters — if the show instead pursued an episodic format, where every episode finds the Commandos doing a new mission, fighting a new baddie, and then ending with this multi-episode arc in Pokolistan. That would allow Gunn to explore these characters more rather than just introducing them, using them, and dumping them. (Among the characters wasted on a single episode are Congorilla, a man who uses a magical amulet to morph into a giant gorilla. James Gunn, I’ll write a spec script for a Congorilla movie if you want me to.)

Why Does Creature Commandos Exist?

The several-million-dollar question. The real reason this exists, according to The Hollywood Reporter, is that Gunn had just come off a successful launch to Peacemaker and was propositioned by Max for another streaming series. He wrote all seven episodes of Creature Commandos before he was offered the universe-building gig at DC, and since he became the one who greenlights projects, he approved his own series that he had just pitched to HBO. It’s a fairly straightforward story about Creature Commandos simply being the first cab off the rank.

But why release it now, before Superman: Legacy? I’ve thought about it a bit, since I’m just as confused as you, trying to puzzle out why DC Studios would release a seven-episode animated series about a new cast of characters, exclusive to streaming, when it knew it probably wouldn’t perform that well, given the numbers on its previous animated series. Here are a few possible reasons I’ve come up with, and I’ll get into them below:

1. It’s a fans-only appetizer to the DC Universe

2. It’s a way of thanking the fans for their interest in Gunn’s previous DC projects

3. It’s a way to flesh out the DC Universe beyond what we’ll see in Superman: Legacy

4. It’s a statement from Max in favor of not just Gunn’s new vision for the DC Universe, but animation as a whole

5. Content!

The first point is one Gunn happily made himself. “Nothing is canon until Creature Commandos next year,” he said on Threads in September 2023, calling the show “a sort of aperitif to the DCU.” He promised “a deeper dive into the universe with Superman: Legacy after that.” The catch is, this show was written first, before Gunn was named the Kevin Feige of the DC Universe, so it’s hard to tell whether the tone, style, and approach he shows with Creature Commandos is the one he plans to be using for the DC projects he’s writing now. Maybe if he wrote this show in 2025, it would look completely different. Still, it’s nice to think that Gunn and Safran wanted to officially start the DCU with a show mostly for hardcore DC fans, a streaming project full of weirdos and freaks made on the cheap before the hundred-million-dollar theatrical crowd-pleaser premieres later in the year. The cast of the show — it’s mostly minor villains from the comics — also seems to acknowledge how Marvel built its entertainment empire. We start with the B- and C-list characters and work up from there.

The second point: It’s hard to miss that Gunn’s new vision for the DCU treats both of Gunn’s projects as loosely canonical while discarding everything else. This series not only shows what’s canon and what isn’t, but it also exists as a way of thanking the fans who watched and loved The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker. The positive reception to those projects is definitely what made Warner Bros. choose Gunn to lead the new DC Universe. As such, Creature Commandos is a story told in the same style as those other projects, that uses some familiar characters, and teases a bunch of stuff that major DC fans will likely salivate over, like Gorilla Grodd, Clayface, and brief glimpses of Superman and Batman.

Third, a short TV series set in this new DC Universe is a great way to add texture and history to a world we haven’t seen anything from yet. Superman: Legacy is likely not going to start with a 20-minute monologue narrating the history of this version of the DC Universe, so smaller projects like Creature Commandos help to flesh out the world. We learn that people know about Themyscira, for instance, and that Amanda Waller is operating in the shadows, still up to her old tricks. We’re entering the DC Universe as a fully lived-in world where there are already heroes, villains, metahumans, and monsters.

Fourth, Creature Commandos is also a several-million-dollar check showing the studio’s investment in James Gunn and his vision. Warner Bros. is notoriously mercurial when it comes to following through on its projects. And under the leadership of David Zaslav, the studio gained a reputation for being intensely anti-creator. Under Zaslav, dozens of animated shows were removed from Max — it costs money to host shows on a streaming site — showing that Max, Warner Bros., and Zaslav don’t care about animated programs, their creators, or their fans. On the film front, Zaslav canceled numerous projects in post-production, more willing to cancel movies as a tax write-off than release an imperfect film. Releasing Creature Commandos, an animated adults-only cartoon from the guy in charge of the new DC Universe, could be read as a statement from Zaslav, Max, and Warner Bros. that those days of treating creators like garbage and animation as disposable are over. Hopefully. That Max is willing to release a low-viewership animated series from Gunn should also be read as an enthusiastic endorsement of his new vision for the DC Universe.

Fifth, there’s the reason why anything is ever released nowadays: content. Regardless of whether it makes sense or not to start the DC Universe with a team of C-list monsters, at the end of the day, it’s another piece of IP-driven content that Max can release to pad out its library. The show premiered while Dune: Prophecy was in the middle of its run and ended shortly before Harley Quinn began its new season — two shows with which Creature Commandos, in theory, shares a lot of audience appeal. One could argue that one of Creature Commandos’ primary goals from a business standpoint was making sure a certain target audience of subscribers (comic book movie fans and 13- to 25-year-old men) paid for an extra month of Max.

Undoubtedly, the show would have drawn more viewers if Max sat on it for six months and released it after Superman: Legacy hit theaters. But releasing it in December 2024 not only ensures a high-profile DC property releases on Max for Q4, but it also covertly fills out the DC Universe catalog before most fans even arrive. Would it have been smarter to wait until fans see Superman: Legacy and then release Creature Commandos week by week, or already have this series on Max so that people excited for the DC Universe can bingewatch it before or after Superman premieres? Released this way, the show makes the DC Universe seem a teensy bit bigger than it would have been had Superman come first.

There are probably a dozen more reasons why Creature Commandos exists. Maybe Gogol Bordello blackmailed James Gunn and forced him to write an entire show around his music. Maybe Alan Tudyk is a really big fan of Doctor Phosphorus and Gunn wrote this as a favor to him. Maybe Gunn had an itch to write a Frankenstein adaptation. Or maybe — and this is the theory I’m going with — Gunn just really wants to read your Bride of Frankenstein fanfiction. I don’t blame him — the character is cool as hell.

Creature Commandos is now available to stream on Max.