We Need Gorilla City in the DCU

A new era of DC storytelling is on the horizon, thanks to James Gunn and Peter Safran’s planned interconnected universe of movies and television shows. The first ten projects on that slate have already been confirmed with great fanfare, ranging from massive blockbuster movies like Superman and Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, to wacky television shows like Creature Commandos and Booster Gold. Gunn and Safran have already teased that these projects are just the tip of the iceberg for their decade-long plan of storytelling, and fans are already campaigning for certain elements of canon from the comics to be folded in. If and when the DC Universe decides to dive into the world of The Flash, one corner of the canon should join that list — Gorilla City.

Created by John Broome and Carmine Infantino, the concept of Gorilla City first made its debut in 1959’s The Flash #106. As the name suggests, Gorilla City is a hidden kingdom in Africa ruled and populated by sentient, speaking gorillas. Barry Allen / The Flash crosses paths with the locale time and time again, in part thanks to his fights with two of Gorilla City’s inhabitants, Solovar and Gorilla Grodd. The lore of Gorilla City has been expanded upon in more recent years, both in The Flash stories and in various other DC tales. This includes the publisher’s recent Rogues miniseries, which imagined a number of The Flash’s villains in their twilight years, attempting to orchestrate a seemingly-impossible heist from Gorilla City. Fans may be familiar with Gorilla City thanks to its appearances in other media, including various pieces of animation and The CW’s The Flash television show. But 2023’s The Flash movie did not involve or even hint at the concept at all, instead focusing on its Flashpoint-inspired storytelling and its carousel of cameos from largely-deceased DC movie and TV actors.

This leaves an opening for the DCU to potentially have fun with Gorilla City, either as its own concept or as a fresh new source of conflict for an inevitable movie reboot of The Flash. For starters, the fight against Gorilla City isn’t solely tied to Barry, so any member of The Flash family or even another random character from the larger DCU could realistically have a fun adventure there. Gunn has also highlighted how the DCU will celebrate the various fictional cities of its heroes and villains, with Metropolis, Gotham, and Star City each having a distinct aesthetic and identity that sets them apart from our real world. Introducing the fantastical Gorilla City, even just in a single project, would hammer that point home even further.

It also helps massively that, especially within the past year, movies with Gorilla City-like concepts have been thriving in our recent popular culture. March’s Godzilla x Kong heavily revolved around Kong discovering a hidden tribe of his fellow giant gorillas in Hollow Earth, and the ensuing fight to topple the reign of their tyrannical leader, Skar King. May’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes showcased a similar conflict involving a number of apes and Proximus Caesar, who wanted to break into one of the humans’ last vaults to steal their weapons and gain power. Both of these movies shattered their respective box office expectations, with Kingdom still performing incredibly well nearly two months after its release, so it is clear that plenty of moviegoers are enjoying that kind of story. The modern Apes franchise has already proved that point in spades, striking a balance between the silly, meme-worthy heightened reality of the saga, and the incredibly emotional character arcs of its CGI protagonists. With another Godzilla x Kong movie confirmed, and another five Apes films ideally on the horizon, it’s clear that audiences are finding the cinematic exploits of primates to be watchable and compelling. The DC Universe has plenty of reason to capitalize on that trend, and finally give Gorilla City the cinematic debut that it deserves.