In mid-2022, executives at what was then HBO Max approached James Gunn with a request to do another series adapted from DC Comics following his hit “Peacemaker.” His first idea: an animated series loosely based on the DC Comics characters known as “Creature Commandos,” that is, a group of monsters thrown together into a black ops team tasked with destroying their enemies with everyone means to switch off. He custom-wrote the seven-episode first season in a matter of weeks — and then Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav hired Gunn and Peacemaker executive producer Peter Safran to run DC Studios and relaunch the DC Universe.

“And I said, ‘Oh, I know what I can greenlight!'” Gunn says with a laugh.

Two years later, the light-hearted TV-MA series “Creature Commandos,” debuting on Max on December 5, serves as something of an appetizer for the new DCU before Gunn’s feature film “Superman” delivers the main course when it premieres July 2025. As Studio co-head Gunn sees the series as an opportunity to both establish his overall creative philosophy for the DCU and show how he wants to expand the broader storytelling landscape.

“I just liked the idea of ​​a gentle introduction to our universe where metahumans, monsters, magic and incredibly complicated political situations exist,” says Gunn. “And we see the world of the DCU from an animated perspective, where creating a battlefield costs the same as creating a kitchen – well, not exactly, but not as dissimilar as it would be in a movie.”

Working in animation also gave Gunn the freedom to make the show as violent and sexual as anything he’s done in live action – for example, Dr. Phosphorus (voiced by Alan Tudyk) doesn’t mind using his radioactive skin to melt his face against enemies and several characters disrobe for periods of enthusiastic intercourse. But Gunn warns that this kind of exuberant boundary-pushing won’t be a part of every DC Studios project.

“One of the main things I want to establish is that you can do anything at DC Studios,” he says. “We can prepare complete family meals. We can do something aimed at a general audience, like Superman. We can create something that is violent and sexual – which I didn’t think was possible The violent and sexual; “Peacemaker” is both violent and sexual – but I want each project to have its own voice. It’s not about creating a world where everything is just sex and violence. It’s about creating a world where we can tell the story about a certain type of character in different genres.”

To that end, Gunn and executive producer Dean Lorey assembled their cast—including Indira Varma as The Bride; Zoë Chao as Nina Mazursky, an amphibian scientist; and Sean Gunn as GI Robot, a World War II-era Nazi-killing android – with the intention that the actors would also reprise their roles in live-action if they were needed for another DCU production. The show already does this in reverse: Sean Gunn also voices Weasel, the human-sized furry mammal he first played in James Gunn’s 2021 live-action film “The Suicide Squad”; Viola Davis will reprise her role as Amanda Waller from this film and “Peacemaker,” along with Steve Agee as his “Peacemaker” character John Economos.

For most of the new cast, the potential to play their roles in live-action is where it’s at right now.

“It’s not contractual,” Tudyk says with a laugh. “That would be great!”

“I don’t want to get too excited about it,” Chao adds, “because I’m looking forward to being involved in the animated version. I could still do it, so I’ll believe it when it happens.”

When Gunn first asked David Harbor if he wanted to play Eric Frankenstein — a learned goof who was convinced the bride would eventually love him — “we just talked about it casually,” Harbor says. The actor also doesn’t know when or if he would embody Frankenstein on camera, let alone whether through makeup, performance capture CGI or “a little bit of both.” But his face lights up when he talks about the possibility.

“There’s such a big universe out there that (Gunn) wants to play with in little stories,” Harbor says. “He says he doesn’t want this big MCU arc. He wants to play more individual things. But wouldn’t it be fun to see Frankenstein show up in a Batman movie?”

While the Commandos’ live-action future is still uncertain, one actor, Frank Grillo – who voices Rick Flag Sr., the seasoned military veteran set to lead the team – has already reprized his role in Superman and in “Superman” adopted Season 2 of “Peacemaker” as the central narrative thread that connects all three projects.

“It was scary and exciting at the same time,” Grillo says of the realization that he would be bringing Flag Sr. to life in the flesh. “(Gunn) said the character looked like me, and then I saw the character and thought, Me Wish I looked like this guy. But then I watched the first four episodes and was blown away by how attractive my animated self is.”

Grillo has already encountered a difficult logistical hurdle in bringing Flag Sr. to “Peacemaker,” where his character replaces Waller as head of ARGUS, the U.S. government agency that oversees the commandos and other metahuman activities. Because the actor’s Paramount+ series “Tulsa King” was filming at the same time, he was unable to recreate Flag Sr.’s distinctive gray coif. “Hair was a problem,” says Grillo. “I wanted my hair to be exactly how I am in the animation because I think that’s a badass haircut. But due to my other commitments, I couldn’t do that, so we had to reverse engineer the hair.”

The production aimed to make the animation in general seem “a little more realistic,” says Lorey, compared to recent DC animated series like “Harley Quinn.” “We wanted to give it a sort of Eastern European feel and have a darker, more complex color palette,” he says.

This realism became particularly evident when the animation team began to visualize Gunn’s already impressive descriptions of the action sequences.

“James usually gets very graphic with his pictures,” says Agee. “You can read it and say, ‘Jesus Christ, that’s brutal.’ And then when you see You think, ‘Holy shit, this is even more brutal than it was on the page.'”

According to Gunn, there was even a point where he wondered if the animators had gone a little too far. “Originally the script was written so that there were definitely violent moments, but in the end it maybe wasn’t so violent, you know?” he says. “The truth is, what they did was so great that I thought, ‘Oh, let’s just do it.’ It just seemed true. I like the mix of the sweetness of some moments and the melancholy of these outcasts and then this terrible violence that we see from time to time. And the sexiness!”

The animated film that seems to have surprised Gunn the most involved no violence, but rather the decision to create an animated version of it for the opening credits.

“We did it without telling James,” Lorey says as Gunn, sitting next to him, begins to blush. “We thought: I hope he’s not offended!”

“Well, I didn’t say no, but I didn’t want people to think I told them to put themselves in it,” Gunn says with a laugh. “My ego was stroked And I was very embarrassed. But at the end of the day I said OK, and it’s in there. So what are you going to do?”