Six days from now, Moon Knight finally premieres on Disney Plus, and we’ll be able to discover for ourselves whether it’s the game-changing and wholly unique tonal shift for the Marvel Cinematic Universe we’ve been promised.
The chances are exceedingly high that it will be, because Kevin Feige isn’t one to make promises that he can’t live up to, which is part of the bargain when you’re the architect of the single most successful film and television franchise of all-time, not to mention the undisputed biggest and most popular property in modern cinema.
Thanks to such unprecedented critical and commercial acclaim, Marvel Studios are free to take increasingly large swings when it comes to creativity and content, and that’s set to be very true of Moon Knight. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, lead writer and executive producer Jeremy Slater shared his excitement at being able to push the envelope.
“The MCU has sort of earned the right to take those big swings. At this point, the MCU is the Star Wars of our day, for a whole new generation. I think if they had tried to do a character like Moon Knight early on, in the original Iron Man days, it would have been such a weird swing. But because we’ve opened up [the world] and brought monsters and magic and gods and aliens and things like that [into the MCU], I think audiences are going to be a lot more accepting of some of the weird places we go in this show.”
Slater is right in saying that Moon Knight would have felt out of place when the MCU was in its infancy, but given the way the scope and scale of the mythology has expanded over the last 14 years, a supernatural antihero who gets gifted powers by an Egyptian deity is positively quaint.