If Marvel Cinematic Universe projects were only to be based on characters that were household names, then the franchise would be a completely different animal to what it is today. Hell, a lot of people weren’t even familiar with Iron Man before Robert Downey Jr. turned Tony Stark into an instant cinematic icon in the space of a single prologue.
So far, Kevin Feige’s brainchild has done a stellar job of balancing A-list superheroes with some deeper cuts, and they don’t come much deeper than Moon Knight. While the supernatural vigilante has been a firm fan favorite dating back decades, the general public might have been left scratching their heads when he was announced for his own Disney Plus series.
As directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead explained in a recent interview with ComicBookMovie, though, that relative level of anonymity helped the creative team dig deeper into who Steven Grant, Marc Spector, and the rest of the various personalities on display really are.
“Jeremy Slater adapted this material and there’s something about being tasked with giving a comic book character’s origin story. It’s so interesting, in the sense of, Moon Knight’s been around for 50 years, that’s actually a relatively young superhero, but it still requires, in 50 years, that the origin story be retold several times. That’s just comic books, that’s how they work. They don’t work in direct continuity.
Can you imagine if Batman, created in 1927, is still alive somehow? But, it really felt like Jeremy Slater really took the greatest hits of those 50 years and assembled something very special and very meaningful and very of our time. We became giant fans of every run of Moon Knight, but especially the Limire/Smallwood run, which we tried to capture the spirit of visually as much as we could.”
Moon Knight has been going down a storm so far, and we’ve only spent two episodes with Oscar Isaac’s title hero. Four weeks from now, you can guarantee that MCU enthusiasts will never forget the name.
