Did you know who Marc Spector was before Disney+’s Moon Knight? Prior to the announcement that Oscar Isaac would be heading to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, only dedicated comics readers really knew the character. I had heard whispers of him and knew about aspects of his storyline because I followed people who loved Marc Spector and Moon Knight most of all. But to the general viewing and even some of the comics-reading public, Moon Knight wasn’t necessarily on their radar.
This seems to have come in handy for the creators behind the show. Moon Knight’s relative obscurity also allowed head writer Jeremy Slater to adapt the character for Disney+ in a way that brought new fans in, while also calling back to the aspects of the character that remained through each new origin story. He had both the shape of things and a clean slate to work with.
Talking to ComicBookMovie, directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (who share directing duties with Mohamed Diab) broke down recreating the character of Moon Knight for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and how it worked given how relatively “young” and unknown Marc Spector, Steven Grant, and Moon Knight are in regards to other MCU comic book characters.
“Yeah, obviously, Jeremy Slater adapted this material and there’s something about being tasked with giving a comic book character’s origin story,” Benson revealed. “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.”
Benson went on to talk about how Slater combined those stories and made a sort of “greatest hits” of the 50 years that Moon Knight has been around in order to create the show that we’re seeing on Disney+.
“Can you imagine if Batman, created in 1927, is still alive somehow?” he joked. “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.”
The future of Moon Knight
The good thing about the series being based around such an unknown character is that they can take Marc Spector and Steven Grant anywhere, and we don’t have many preset expectations or requirements. By pulling in the bigger aspects of their story that people do know, Slater, Benson, Moorhead, and Diab have created a world in which they can make the character of Moon Knight their own, while still honoring the source material. And he can go anywhere and do anything as we come to learn more about him.
(via ComicBook.com, featured image: MARZ VFX/Marvel Entertainment)
