James Gunn is a talented filmmaker. He turned the little-known Guardians of the Galaxy into one of the most successful and beloved Marvel franchises of all time, so it makes sense that DC would entrust him with rebranding their stable of superheroes for the next decade. Gunn has been open about his decision making process on social media, and the casting choices he’s made for the upcoming Superman: Legacy have us pretty psyched.
There is, however, one thing that we’re curious about. There’s one particular DC character who has gotten short shrift repeatedly over the years, whether it be in animated or live action form. We sincerely hope that Gunn can rehabilitate this character, because Red Tornado is a lot cooler than he’s been given credit for in the last few years.
Red Tornado has been around since 1960. The character was introduced as Ulthoon in Mystery in Space #61, before being rebranded as Red Tornado in a 1968 issue of Justice League of America. He’s the result of an android merging with a sentient tornado, which effectively makes him DC’s answer to Vision. The problem is, DC television shows have struggled with how to depict him.
Several different versions of Red Tornado have appeared in Supergirl. The first one we met was from Earth-38, the second from Earth-X, and the third from Earth-Prime. Each of them have slightly different designs, as evidenced by the post made by Reddit user kyseancarter, but none of them particularly work. They look more like designs for Power Rangers villains than a beloved DC character. We know that Supergirl and the rest of the Arrowverse has been limited by the constraints of their budgets, but Red Tornado stands out as a particularly egregious example of a character that was botched in execution.
The trick, as other Reddit users have posited, is to make him more human than android. The designs that exist make him difficult to empathize with, but a design that emphasized his humanity, or at least his emotional response, could be a game-changer. The obvious example is Vision in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The character is a 1:1 in terms of comic book design, but the decision to emphasize Vision’s humanlike qualities through the performance of Paul Bettany, and then embellish with CGI, proved to be ingenious. It not only made the character work, but it made his death in Avengers: Infinity War (2018) utterly devastating (even if he was semi-resurrected in WandaVision).
Gunn has not talked about bringing Red Tornado into the DC Universe, but given how ambitious his plans for expansion have been elsewhere, we expect to see the character at some point. In February 2023, the co-CEO responded to a list of DC characters who should be introduced in live-action form by tweeting: “I have to quit saying how many as people are going to be able to cross reference and figure out exactly who is who, but you’ll see some of these characters and a couple of them are very important very early on (probably not who you expect).”
We can only hope that the co-CEO takes heed of the limitations/mistakes of past iterations and gives fans the Red Tornado that they deserve.