Kevin Smith Reveals Cancelled Marvel Crossover Event Involving Man-Thing
The character of Man-Thing made his Marvel Cinematic Universe debut in the recent Werewolf By Night special for Disney+, but that wasn't the first time in recent memory that the character was set to grace our screens. According to filmmaker Kevin Smith, Man-Thing was a character who they planned to use in a four-show crossover back when Hulu was planning on making a number of animated Marvel series, including a take on Howard the Duck which would have been showrun by Smith. Instead, the character didn't show up until last week, at which point Smith finally understood something he had been told before.
Apparently, the merging of Marvel Television into Marvel Studios and the creation of Disney+'s onslaught of Marvel content was not the only reason given for the cancellation. According to Smith, he was told that Marvel specifically had plans for 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 see the video below, with the relevant piece of the conversation starting around 1 hour and 34 minutes.
Werewolf by Night is a hit with critics and fans alike. Initially launching on Rotten Tomatoes with a rare perfect 100-percent score, the Halloween special's Tomatometer now rests at a 91-percent Certified Fresh. Not only that but the review aggregator's Audience Score—a composite score from non-critic fans who've seen the project—is one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's highest scores ever.
As of this writing, Werewolf by Night has a 93-percent Fresh Audience Score on the site, meaning 93-percent of the thousands of fans who've seen it and reviewed it on the site enjoyed it. That reaction from the fandom places it as the fourth-most popular project on the platform, tied with Disney+'s What If...?.
You can see the special on Disney+.