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When Marvel released Moon Knight on Disney+ back in 2022, it was a curious thing. Caught somewhere between needing to include the rather expected CGI battles of a Marvel show and its desire to meditate on the chaos of living with dissociative identity disorder, Marc Spector’s eight-episode miniseries divided viewers who either couldn’t get enough of the antihero’s hijinks or felt exhausted by them, with star Oscar Isaac’s English accent, based on idiosyncratic U.K. presenter Karl Pilkington, becoming a surprisingly large part of fan discussions about the actor’s portrayal.
Mortal Kombat II writer Jeremy Slater was originally brought on to develop the show for Marvel, but he was notably absent from Moon Knight’s press tour and rollout. Why he wasn’t involved in either didn’t become clear until later, but in a new interview with THR, Slater discusses the reasons for his exit.
Telling the trade that at the start of his career, he’d “fight notes and reactions from my collaborators,” he added that in the last decade, his TV experiences have helped him “learn that collaboration is the name of the game,” and that it has “fundamentally changed” his writing.
Slater then went on to field a more specific question about why he’d left Moon Knight during the show’s production.
“I certainly don’t want to say anything bad or negative about Marvel or my time there,” he said. “They took a chance on me, and they let me assemble a really great writers’ room. I was really, really proud of the work that we did. The end result was I left the project over creative disagreements with the director. The two of us simply had very different visions on what the show should be about. Ultimately, he won that creative battle, so I stepped away. He then brought in his own team of writers to create a show that was his vision and the story that he wanted to tell.”
Slater doesn’t name the director he clashed with creatively on the project, but since the series’s directors were Mohamed Diab, Justin Benson, and Aaron Moorhead, he may be referring to Diab, who helmed the majority of Moon Knight’s episodes.
The Umbrella Academy producer explained that his experience at Marvel “certainly was not a traditional showrunner experience where the writer is the boss,” but that he also “can’t speak to what the process is like now,” adding, “I know a lot of writers who have gone through the development process at Marvel and have had great times. It’s just that the pairing of writer and director is always really, really tricky. When it works — like I think it did on Mortal Kombat II with Simon McQuoid — it is magical and wonderful. But when it doesn’t work, it’s probably really frustrating for everyone involved.”
The post The Behind-the-Scenes Clash That Changed Marvel’s Moon Knight appeared first on Den of Geek.
