Marvel Television was always a point of consternation for Kevin Feige, with Jeph Loeb tasked to oversee the studio’s small screen output, which was tangentially connected to the mainline cinematic universe at best.
Once Feige assumed the role of Chief Creative Officer, one of his first orders of business was to fold Marvel Television, wipe the canonical slate clean, and start afresh. One of the downsides is that a number of adult-orientated Hulu shows ended up being canned, with Patton Oswalt’s M.O.D.O.K. and the upcoming Hit-Monkey the only ones to survive the chopping block.
As is the case with all Marvel content, the various standalone projects were set to join forces in an epic crossover event that would have seen M.O.D.O.K. and Hit-Monkey join forces with Howard the Duck, Dazzler and Tigra for The Offenders. In an interview with Murphy’s Multiverse, Hit-Monkey showrunners Will Speck and Josh Gordon offered up some details about what they had in store.
“It was a very loose plan. It was the idea that there were a few sidelined characters that could, at some point, join up and that was the vision. One of the original concepts, when they pitched it to Hulu, was, ‘Let’s design four separate shows that don’t necessarily have plans to combine and find a way to combine them’. We were always in talks with the other showrunners like Jordan Blum to figure out where the points of intersection were. Stylistically and humor-wise, the shows were never created to resemble each other. We always thought that it was such a cool choice to combine the different styles.”
A violent, foul-mouthed superhero series that would have meshed the stop-motion stylings of M.O.D.O.K. with the stylized 2D animation of Hit-Monkey and the rest and delivered an insane romp hardly sounds like the sort of thing Feige would have awarded a green light, so it’s no surprise The Offenders wound up biting the dust.
