Moon Knight premiered on Disney+ in 2022, and while most fans seemed to enjoy the series, it was occasionally as messy as Marc Spector's psyche. The show's asylum-set scenes didn't make a ton of sense (perhaps that was the point), and Ethan Hawke's Arthur Harrow was far from the best big bad we've seen in the MCU.
Hawke's work was stellar, though, as was Oscar Isaac's. Moon Knight ended with the emergence of a third personality, Jake Lockley, but the character hasn't been seen since and isn't currently expected to factor into Avengers: Doomsday.
Had Kang Variant Rama-Tut still been in play, he likely would have done. Still, plans change, something Moon Knight Head Writer Jeremy Slater made clear in a recent interview with ComicBook.com. It turns out the Moon Knight he wrote was quite a bit different to the one we watched three years ago.
"Ultimately, [Marvel] went in a different direction and the director put together his own team of writers," he explained. "You know when you are coming in to play in such a big sandbox that you are…borrowing someone else’s toys to play with for a short amount of time and, at the end of the day, they don’t belong to you. You know that going in, so it wasn’t a surprise at all."
"The goal was if Marc Spector was the Avatar of Khonshu, we were going to take Bushman and make him the avatar of a different Egyptian god and let them duke it out," the writer said of scrapped plans for one of Moon Knight's most popular foes.
He added, "The problem we kept running into was Black Panther had just come out and Michael B. Jordan was so damn good as Killmonger in that movie, that he casts such a big shadow...that everything we wrote wound up feeling a little derivative."
Bushman was hinted at in Moon Knight, so the door is open to Marvel Studios potentially revisiting the character down the line. However, if and when that happens, Slater has no intention of being involved.
"If there is another Moon Knight, the ball is in Kevin Feige and Oscar Isaac’s court," the writer noted. "Once Kevin figures out the best way to use that character, what is the right story and who are the right storytellers to bring that to life, I would be shocked if we didn’t see him again at some point." He'd go on to say that, for now, he's more focused on directing and isn't looking to make an MCU return.
While many of you will be disappointed by Bushman's absence, it sounds like Slater couldn't figure out a new approach to the villain. That's likely part of the reason why a new team of writers was enlisted, a move which came at a time when Marvel Studios was still trying to take a movie-like approach to developing its series.
Moon Knight is now streaming on Disney+ in its entirety.