With Creature Commandos launching on Max this week, there's a huge amount of excitement surrounding what promises to be our first glimpse at the new DCU.
While Superman will be the true launching platform for this reboot, James Gunn has insisted that animated projects will be just as important as live-action ones. That makes Creature Commandos essential viewing, particularly as characters are expected to hop between both mediums.
"We’ve talked about all of these characters in live-action and how we would do them, if we did them, in live-action," the filmmaker told The Hollywood Reporter. "I don’t want to give away any secrets, but we use some technology in Superman that’s completely new in regards to this kind of stuff. So we would know exactly how to do G.I. Robot."
That's a very intriguing remark, particularly as we're not 100% sure which character would require similar technology to G.I. Robot. The only one that comes to mind is The Engineer, though she's more human than robot, at least based on what's been shown in set photos.
As for how he's setting out to create consistency between live-action and animation, Gunn teased the DCU's status quo and what that means for the world's superheroes.
"Everything is very consistent in terms of the politics of the world and where the world is at and what’s going on; who are the metahumans in power, who are the metahumans not in power; who are the power brokers, who are not the power brokers," he teased. "So we see a glimpse of it here, but we see more of it in Superman and Peacemaker."
Elsewhere in the interview, Gunn made a point of revealing that, in this world, the Justice League "don't exist yet." We know Maxwell Lord has a team of heroes at his disposal, but they're not necessarily any iteration of that team (the prevailing theory up until now has been that they must be the corporate Justice League International).
The DC Studios boss is also committed to exploring the dynamic between the actors who work in animation, revealing that Indira Varma and Zoë Chao, Frank Grillo and David Harbour, and Grillo and Maria Bakalova were all paired up in the recording booth at one time or another.
"There are these couples throughout the show, and it was important to get the energy between them so that it didn’t read like your usual thing with one line, one line, one line, one line. We wanted to really have this conversationalist, back-and-forth energy, and Indira and Zoë added little things afterwards to really keep it alive and make it feel like it’s real. So it was important to us from the beginning to keep that naturalistic style."
Superman tells the story of Superman's journey to reconcile his Kryptonian heritage with his human upbringing as Clark Kent of Smallville, Kansas. He is the embodiment of truth, justice and the American way, guided by human kindness in a world that sees kindness as old-fashioned.
Superman is currently set to be released in theaters on July 11, 2025.