Moon Knight debuted on Disney+ in 2022 to positive reviews—it's been "Certified Fresh" by Rotten Tomatoes with 86%—but got lost in the shuffle during Marvel Studios' quantity-over-quality phase.
The series was produced at a time when Marvel was making TV shows as if they were movies. That meant having a "Head Writer," but no showrunner. As a result, they were left without any one person to steer the ship, especially as most had multiple directors.
Moon Knight was a success, but in the second half of the season, it was hard to shake the feeling that something was a little off. The asylum-set scenes didn't quite add up, and while that might have been the point, many fans felt that the show didn't quite stick the landing.
As we write this, Oscar Isaac's Marc Spector remains in limbo, and Season 2 is not in the works. However, the actor has expressed interest in returning to the MCU for Midnight Sons.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Moon Knight Head Writer Jeremy Slater confirmed that he left the series following creative differences with an unnamed director. Mohamed Diab was a big part of the show's development, so it's safe to assume it was him, not Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead.
"I certainly don’t want to say anything bad or negative about Marvel or my time there. 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."
"It certainly was not a traditional showrunner experience where the writer is the boss. That was not remotely my experience at the time, but I can’t speak to what the process is like now. 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."
Elsewhere in the conversation, Slater reflected on his time working on 2015's Fantastic Four reboot. He started by confirming that he wasn't privy to any on-set drama and that his and Josh Trank's "awesome script" was rewritten...by X-Men: The Last Stand and Dark Phoenix helmer Simon Kinberg.
"It wasn’t until I was sitting there in that first audience and realizing, 'Oh no, something happened here. There was nothing in there that remotely resembled what I had set out to do.'"
"But there was a good two-year period there where I was walking around very confident. I was like, 'You guys, just wait for Fantastic Four. We’re the next Christopher Nolan. We’ve got the next [Dark Knight] trilogy on the way,'" Slater recalled. "You always go in with the highest of hopes and the best of aspirations. But sometimes the projects don’t turn out the way that you dreamed about or envisioned."
Slater has since moved on to the Mortal Kombat franchise, but is among the writers that James Gunn and Peter Safran enlisted for the DC Studios writers' room. We've since heard little to nothing about that.