After six decades of DC heroes reaching cinemas, the DC Universe is finally making room for one of its most enduringly strange ideas: super-powered gorillas. HBO Max has commissioned The People v. Gorilla Grodd, a mockumentary miniseries from the team behind American Vandal. According to Variety, Tony Yacenda and Dan Perrault are attached as showrunners.
Yacenda and Perrault describe the project as something that should feel less like a conventional DCU instalment and more like a surviving artefact from that fictional world: a Daily Planet documentary made for Metropolis. Their stated aim is to combine comic-book absurdity, comedy and true-crime storytelling.
A Daily Planet investigation into Gorilla City
The series will be presented as an in-universe documentary made by Jimmy Olson, with Skyler Gisondo returning as Superman’s close friend. Olson will revisit the murder trial of Gorilla Grodd, who stands accused of killing his father in order to seize control of Gorilla City. The investigation will ask whether the psychic ape was framed, with the Daily Planet supporting the search for answers.
“The People Vs Gorilla Grodd, the new show from DC Studios, is coming to HBO Max. Our first foray into the true crime genre.”
— James Gunn (@jamesgunn.bsky.social), posted 21 August 2026. The original post announced the project.
American Vandal’s creators meet the Flash’s enemy
Mockumentary crime is familiar territory for Yacenda and Perrault. Their Netflix series American Vandal treated the investigation of a teenager accused of drawing obscene images on 27 cars as a straight-faced true-crime saga. Jimmy Tatro, who appeared in that series, will join the new production as the voice of Gorilla Grodd.
The premise may sound like a broad comedy, but Grodd is one of DC’s most formidable villains. The Flash adversary combines immense physical strength with powerful psychic abilities and has frequently positioned himself as the leader of the Legion of Doom.
DC’s long-running love affair with apes
The anecdote goes that editor Julius Schwartz believed comic books featuring gorillas on their covers sold dramatically better, encouraging creators to add apes wherever possible. That tradition helped DC develop a particularly colourful collection of simian characters.
Beyond Grodd, that group includes the Ultra-Humanite, Solovar, Monsieur Mallah, Congorilla, Sam Simeon, Titano, Detective Chimp, Gorilla Mob Boss, Mod Gorilla Boss, Ramjam, Tiny, Mogo the Bat-Ape, Beppo the Super-Monkey, Koko and King Colosso. A memorable CW assassination attempt on Obama is one of the few prominent live-action uses of Grodd, while the wider DC film universes have largely left these characters untouched.
Marvel even brought its own super-powered apes to the screen first through the Red Ghost’s Super Apes in Fantastic Four: First Steps, despite completed scenes featuring John Malkovich as the Red Ghost being cut.
One of James Gunn’s early DCU pitches
James Gunn has said the Grodd project was one of the first projects pitched to Warner Bros. after he took over the DCU. Its development sits alongside the Lanterns miniseries, while the wider slate has also faced the box-office failure of Supergirl and the cancellation of other spin-offs for HBO.
That makes The People v. Gorilla Grodd an especially unusual signal of where the DCU may be willing to go next: away from another standard superhero origin and towards a fictional documentary about a psychic ape, a disputed murder and the politics of Gorilla City.
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