Hit-Monkey Writers Pitched the Project to Marvel Studios Too

This Wednesday, all 10 episodes of Hit-Monkey hit Hulu, introducing comic book fans to a hyper-violent take on Marvel's most peculiar assassin. The eponymous character may be from deep within the Marvel Comics lore, but series creators Will Speck and Josh Gordon have been fans of him for the better part of a decade. In fact, the duo continually pitched the House of Ideas on bringing the character to life until someone bit.

"We have been obsessed with Hit-Monkey for about 10 years and actually pitched it to Marvel repeatedly," Gordon tells us. "Every meeting we would have up there, we'd be like 'You guys should make Hit-Monkey. That's the coolest,' to the point where they were like, 'Yeah, I know. We get it. You like Hit-Monkey.' And actually, they were like, 'You're not the first directors to actually pitch Hit-Monkey.' It's got a bit of a cult following."

That's when Gordon revealed he and speck threw the metaphorical "hail mary" and tried to get Hit-Monkey made. This move—which turned out to be a letter sent from their agent to both of Marvel's production arms at the time—yielded a meeting with executives from both Marvel Television and Marvel Studios.

"The next day, we had a meeting with the film division and with the TV division," Gordon adds. "And the TV division bit, and they went, 'Yeah, we actually have a place to use this. We want to do it as an animated show,' which made a lot of sense to us. Because the production of it, like shooting it in Tokyo and the level of live-action sort of funds and resources it would've taken to really pull it off were pretty substantial. So suddenly we're like, 'Oh, wow, let's do it as a really cinematic kind of cool animated version of it,' and it all just came together really quickly."

Hit-Monkey hits Hulu on November 17th. What other Marvel characters would you like to see in an animated series? Let us know your thoughts either in the comments or by hitting our writer @AdamBarnhardt up on Twitter to chat all things Marvel!