The dissolution of Marvel Television saw several animated projects shelved forever once Kevin Feige assumed the role of Chief Creative Officer, where he swiftly wiped the in-development slate clean, disregarded every TV series that came before as official canon, and set the cinematic universe’s Disney Plus plans in motion.
However, two titles managed to survive the cull, with Patton Oswalt’s M.O.D.O.K. arriving on Hulu earlier this year, while Hit-Monkey premieres on the platform tomorrow. There were once plans for an entire interconnected set of shows that would culminate in crossover event The Offenders, but it simply wasn’t to be.
Writers Will Speck and Josh Gordon have always been fans of the cult favorite source material, and in a new interview with ComicBook the duo revealed that they’d pitched Hit-Monkey to both the film and television divisions at Marvel.
“We have been obsessed with Hit-Monkey for about 10 years and actually pitched it to Marvel repeatedly. Every meeting we would have up there, we’d be like ‘You guys should make Hit-Monkey. That’s the coolest,’ to the point where they were like, ‘Yeah, I know. We get it. You like Hit-Monkey.’ And actually, they were like, ‘You’re not the first directors to actually pitch Hit-Monkey.’ It’s got a bit of a cult following. The next day, we had a meeting with the film division and with the TV division.
And the TV division bit, and they went, ‘Yeah, we actually have a place to use this. We want to do it as an animated show,’ which made a lot of sense to us. Because the production of it, like shooting it in Tokyo and the level of live-action sort of funds and resources it would’ve taken to really pull it off were pretty substantial. So suddenly we’re like, ‘Oh, wow, let’s do it as a really cinematic kind of cool animated version of it,’ and it all just came together really quickly.”
No less a name than James Gunn was one of potentially several filmmakers to have floated the idea of a Hit-Monkey feature film in the past, before he was convinced that Guardians of the Galaxy was a much better proposition, and we all know how that turned out in the end. At least fans have just 24 hours to wait before they see the violent and irreverent results of Gordon and Peck’s shared vision for the property.