The comic book character Man-Thing made his MCU debut in the recently released Werewolf By Night special for disney+, but his appearance in the recent special was not supposed to be his first appearance in the MCU. According to director Kevin Smith, Man-Thing is one of the characters that they planned to use in a four-show crossover back when the streaming platform Hulu was planning on making several animated Marvel series. The scrapped project is supposed to include a take on Howard the Duck, which would have been showrun by Smith.
Apparently, one of the reasons why the show was cancelled was because of the merging of Marvel Television into Marvel Studios and Disney+’s several Marvel content. The other reason was, according to Smith, Marvel specifically had other plans for the character Man-Thing.
"When Jeph [Loeb] was running Marvel Television, which was separate from Marvel Studios -- now it's all the same thing, but back then Agents of SHIELD, the Netflix Marvel shows, that was all under Jeph and Marvel Television. So he reached out to me and he was like, 'I've got something that I think you'd be perfect for. Can you come in and meet, sign an NDA?' I did, and when I got into the room, he was like, 'Howard the Duck.' I was like, 'Of course, yes. What a no-brainer.' So we were doing four series -- the Patton Oswalt MODOK series, the Hit-Monkey series, Dazzler and Tigra, and Howard the Duck. So our crossover event, 'The Offenders,' was called 'The Offenders: Giant Sized Man Thing.' So they were all going to meet Man-Thing in our crossover event. When the show got scuttled, when Kevin Feige absorbed Marvel Television and it became part of Marvel Studios and they started doing the Disney+ shows, two of them were already deep in production. MODOK had already shot a bunch of things, or been producing, since it's animated. Same with Hit-Monkey, so they gave them their full order. To stop them would have meant shelving it, and back then people didn't do that sort of thing. That's more of an HBO Max thing of recent. So the two shows that we were just in development, we had a writers room on Howard the Duck, but Dave was in charge of that. I was busy on Masters of the Universe, but then we got the word that they're killing Dazzler & Tigra and Howard the Duck. They hadn't spent a lot of money on Howard the Duck, just to write a few scripts, so it was easy to kill. But part of the reason they told us was that they had plans for Man-Thing. I was like, 'What?!' And we finally saw those plans come to fruition and I'm so delighted that they brought him to life."
You can watch the whole interview below:
The recent Werewolf By Night special of Disney+ was a huge hit to both critics and fans alike. When it was first released on Rotten Tomatoes, it got a rare perfect 100% score. The review aggregator’s Audience Score of the special is one of the MCU’s highest scores ever.
As of the time of writing, Disney+’s Werewolf By Night special has a 92% Audience Score with 1000+ ratings. The special gets a 90% score on the Tomatometer with over 94 reviews.
MCU’s Werewolf By Night special is currently available to stream on Disney+ since it was released back on October 7.
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