Moon Knight Cinematographer Reveals Epic Cape Shot Was Late Addition to Series

By Adam Barnhardt

Despite Moon Knight being distanced from the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the creatives behind the Oscar Isaac vehicle have still paid homage to the character's comic roots. As seen in the show's teasers, Moon Knight Episode 3 had an epic sequence where the titular vigilante leaps down to the ground with his cape making a massive crescent moon as he floats through the air.

As Moon Knight cinematographer Gregory Middleton, the addition of that frame was a pretty late addition to the show in the grand scheme of things. That's just one of the instances the filmmakers chose to replicate from the comic book source material.

"If you went into his office [prop master Deryck Blake], there was an entire massive wall that was all just bits of comics," Middleton says. "Because you sort of populate your brain with that stuff. As you're breaking out how you're going to do a scene, images can come up sometimes from what you're seeing. Him jumping off with the kind of crescent-shaped cape was something that came in quite late while developing Episode Three, because we were trying to figure out how we stage that. And we pitched it to Mohamed since it's an opportunity to get this in there. And he loved that idea."

The filmmaker went on to add that he was careful so as not to shoot the series as if it was a comic book, instead framing Easter eggs and the like in the background of some shots instead of putting them in the spotlight.

"An interesting thing about moving one piece of art to another is you don't want to just put it in there for reference to the original comic. It has to work for our visual storytelling of the show," Middleton adds. "But it's nice if it can have a bit of both because it is a rich character and people have big fans of it."

He concludes, "And the thing is a comic panels is that they're exactly what the writer and artist want. There's nothing in there. We're on a location. Sometimes we're adding things, but we just tried to make sure we were trying to be as deliberate as possible and honor that kind of process. You can put those references in the background and we were always being aware of that when we were framing our shots."

Four episodes of Moon Knight are now streaming on Disney+, and new episodes will be released every Wednesday.

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