While The Offenders won't be making their way to TV anytime soon, the creators of Marvel's Hit-Monkey animated series offered some details on how the proposed team-up would've worked.
Will Speck and Josh Gordon spoke to /Film about the debut of Hit-Monkey on Hulu this week. The conversation briefly touched on The Offenders, which Marvel and Hulu announced in 2019 alongside Hit-Monkey, M.O.D.O.K., Howard the Duck, and Tigra & Dazzler. The series was meant to pull together the four individual shows, similar to The Defenders on Netflix united Marvel's street-level heroes. But that all fell apart when Marvel fired the Tigra & Dazzler showrunners and writers before the series and Howard the Duck were canceled a month later.
"We talked about it a little bit with the team at Marvel TV," Speck said. "And then also with the other showrunners, including Jordan Blum, who did M.O.D.O.K. It was decided that each of these shows should be able to live separate from each other and honor their individual needs. And then we would just figure it out when they were all brought together, and maybe we would choose an animation style that none of the shows had, in order to just create a new offshoot. Or maybe we would do it in one of the show's styles. It never quite got that far, but everybody wanted each individual show to be able to attract its own fanbase and be its own thing. Then they were going to figure it out when they combined it."
While the team-up series ultimately failed to see the light of day, M.O.D.O.K. arrived earlier this year on Hulu to general acclaim. And as Speck mentioned, it had its own unique animation style, utilizing a stop-motion approach. Hit-Monkey, meanwhile, looks more akin to Flash animation and will arrive this week. The two series represent Marvel's first foray into adult animation, likely possible because they involve relatively obscure characters.
"I think the idea was pulling characters from the fringe and bringing them together in a powerful way, à la Avengers, is very Marvel, and that was the original ambition," Gordon said. "But I think it shifted and found its own space. So we're happy with it."
Of course, the live-action world could see these two unusual characters join the MCU. Jim Carrey is rumored to play M.O.D.O.K. and James Gunn originally pitched a Hit-Monkey movie. While the former is merely a rumor for now and the latter never saw the light of day, the animated shows prove no Marvel character is too weird to adapt.
Hit-Monkey debuts Nov. 17 on Hulu.
Source: /Film