Moon Knight writer says a planned Eternals cameo was cut from the show
A flashback scene in ancient Egypt would have seen the heroes fighting alongside one of Khonshu's Avatars
Aux News Moon Knight
Six episodes and lots of Egyptian mythology later, Moon Knight has achieved something pretty rare in the MCU these days—its remained relatively unconnected to the cinematic world it lives in. While other Marvel shows on Disney+ lean into that world’s bread and butter of interconnectedness, Moon Knight focuses solely on Marc Spector without much outside interference.
Apparently, that bubble for Moon Knight wasn’t always planned. In a recent interview with The Direct, head writer of the series, Jeremy Slater says that there was a planned cameo involving the ancient superhero team from Eternals. The proposed flashback scene would have had Eternal members like Kumail Nanjiani’s Kingo teaming up with one of Khonshu’s Avatars in a big action set piece.
“I tried very hard to get the Eternals into the show, just because I’m buddies with Kumail Nanjiani… I want[ed] some Kingo,” explains Slater in the interview. “At one point, there was a flashback on the page that sort of showed one of Khonshu’s Avatars back in ancient Egypt, sort of dealing with Ammit being locked away, and Alexander the Great, and all of that stuff. You sort of saw this Avatar team-up with the Eternals.”
With the great action moments we’ve already witnessed in Moon Knight, there would be no doubt that the stunt team could have pulled this off. Unfortunately, Slater reveals the concept was ultimately scrapped due to it being “massively expensive to recreate Ancient Egypt” with the Eternals, giving up the cameo in order to ensure the strength of the series’ climatic fight in the finale.
“It was one of those things where it was a very fun scene, and it would have been a great cold open to one of the episodes, but it also would have had to come out of our budget somewhere else, and probably would have hurt our finale along the way,” continues Slater. “So, that was the cameo I had to cut. It hurt, but it was also the right thing to do for the show, and I think everyone sort of collectively agreed.”
In the end, Slater and the team at Moon Knight recognized that the series benefitted from keeping the story contained to Marc and Steven Grant’s world. “There’s plenty of time in the future to team this guy up with other characters in the MCU and start building these connections; let’s not force something just because the other shows have all had it,” voices Slater.
Despite the lack of certainty for a season two of the series, it seems highly likely Marvel would want the charm and talent of Oscar Isaac to appear in the universe again. With the duo of Mahershala Ali’s Blade and Kit Harrington’s Black Knight already in London, a team-up between the three seems inevitable, including Steven throwing one too many “bruvs” at them.
56 Comments
It would have been cool, but it seemed like the Eternals only got involved in Deviant-stuff, so why would they show up to God-stuff?
This is going to be a controversial take, but the “we’re super-powerful and manifested to ancient humans as gods, but now we stay out of things unless a very specific circumstance occurs, and sometimes not even then” is pretty bad writing.
You aren’t wrong
There’s nothing more comic-booky than a stupid, logic defying retcon.
Tell that to the Old Testament.
I would hope that’s not particularly controversial. I’m an MCU fan, and I’d readily admit Eternals made little sense in that regard, and it bugged me throughout the whole movie. The Eternals should’ve been left out of the MCU. They are ridiculously messy in the comics, and had to be retconned a bunch, because they were never intended to be part of the regular Marvel Universe.
Kirby was trying to do a standalone series, really just trying to more of his New Gods that was left unfinished at DC after he left them, and never intended it to have anything to do with existing Marvel properties. That’s why he didn’t see any conflict in making them all variations of Greek gods and demigods even though those characters already existed in the regular Marvel continuity. The run didn’t do well and was canceled, but other writers brought them into fold on occasion. The couple times they attempted to reboot the series through the decades and had to do weird retcons, like having the gods of Olympia being totally chill with the Eternals stealing their identities. They’ve never fit into anything and weren’t even mentioned in the comics for spans of decades. In the Avengers comics, during the Dark Celestial stuff in 2018, the pop up again to be entirely killed off. In a similarity to the movie, they discover they’re whole reason for being was a lie and they go insane and kill each other or themselves. Unfortunately, because of the movie, they all got resurrected in a 2021 comic.
Spoiler alert if you haven’t seen the movie, but it’s actually explained pretty well, and this is from someone who doesn’t give a shit about the characters in either comic or film form:They’re essentially organic robots. They’re literally designed to focus on fighting a specific threat and prepare planets for destruction. It makes perfect sense that they don’t interfere in other conflicts because that runs counter to how they’re designed, and the fact that they’re finally starting to care is presented as them dysfunctioning after thousands of years of service.
I’m glad the Eternals happened. I’m glad Richard Madden got one more notch on his belt on the way to Bond. I’m glad Kumail got in shape. I’m glad Selma and Angelina are still in my lives. I’m even glad that talking mannequin Gemma Chan is getting work.
And they may fit here and there – really surprised one of them wasn’t in a certain scene in a certain movie about a certain doctor I saw last night – but no need for an Eternals 2.
That question seems messy but can always be answered by just saying “Also there were some deviants there.”
Somehow, Deviants were there.-Oscar Isaac
Arguably, the gods could have also been fighting Deviants.I was more expecting the answer to be “we had kit harrington show up,” however. Probably for the best this didn’t happen.
lol i think a lot of upcoming eternals ‘news’ is gonna be stuff like this.
Lol yeah. Inhumans 2.0
The Eternals have joined the Inhumans somewhere just off screen.
The Inhumans did at least get many decent and even excellent moments in Agents of SHIELD even if they weren’t the main line up.
I’m cool with them cutting it because the show was enjoyable as its own little “self contained” story. I’m using quotes there because MK does have a few easter eggs and maybe a couple of reference that will be used in other shows/movies down the road, but beyond that, it’s the most the MCU has let a property be its own thing in a long time. That was refreshing
Conceptually I like the idea of a shot that tells you “Moon Knights have been around forever” but we can always get it later. I’d love a scene in some crossover event where Moon Knight meets Thor and Thor says “Oh, one of you lunatic moon guys, great.”
Steven: “Loki? THE Loki? Norse god of mischief. That is SO cool!”
Marc: “Yeah, the guy who invaded New York. One of my old Army buddies was killed in that, asshole”
Jake: “Dios debil” (Puny God in Spanish)
Loki: “Khonshu promised Odin that he was going to stop picking people like you…”
I didn’t love Eternals, but I wouldn’t have minded it. Sometimes with things less popular, these kinds of connections can help endear me to them a little more. Like Iron Fist being bad, but it was still kinda neat to see him interact with other Defenders. Or Electro and Lizard, two awful villains coming back for Spider-Man NWH and being a little better.
I know everyone is having a collective fap session about Moon Knight having no outright ties and only a few references to the larger MCU, but when you consider we could have had Kumail Nanjiana and F. Murray Abraham sassing back and forth, I want you all to realize you were wrong.
I am extremely torn on Moon Knight. It’s a very good show, but it’s not a particularly good MOON KNIGHT show. Why does he have superpowers and put his costume on like Sailor Moon? It felt like the people making it didn’t think “crazy ninja who works for invisible bird god to solve crimes and punch ghosts” was exciting enough which… It definitely is.
I’m conflicted too. I also thought it was excellent, but that it wasn’t really Moon Knight.
I feel like they were afraid of retreading Daredevil territory.
What do you mean? Are you saying the MK in the show wasn’t in line with the comics in some major way? Most of us wouldn’t know or care. I’ve never heard of Moon Knight until February of 2022 and it was a great show.
I’d say it’s like 75% in line with the comics. They got Khonshu DEAD ON, and while they changed what his personalities ARE, they got the idea right. The big change they made is that Moon Knight is a pretty mundane hero who does comparatively little magical stuff and tends to do more detective work. Think Batman but mentally ill and sometimes he talks to mad, aeons-gone gods. Sometimes magic does come into it, but it’s in minor, old-school pulp kinds of ways.They definitely MCU-ed it up a notch, which was a questionable decision since there’s probably very little chance of there being a Moon Knight movie any time soon. Also – and this is just a nitpick – but I didn’t like the mummy aesthetic.
There’s also word that the original plan was for Echo to be introduced in this show rather than Hawkeye, and I can’t imagine what that would look like (would Kingpin be involved too?).
Echo and Moon Knight were a comics pairing for a bit so they do have history with each other. Moon Knight does a lot more defending the city at night stuff in the comics than traipsing around Egypt stuff tbh. The reason they were told they couldn’t use Echo was because they already had plans for her, but I strongly suspect that the Echo show will involve MK to some extent either a cameo or a crossover as will Blade.
That’s got be a rumor rumor, because I hadn’t even heard it. From my understanding Echo was a result of both D’Onofrio and Cox signing contracts. There’s some dedicated leakers out there if seek them out. They tend to get outed and fired, and somehow think spoiling stuff on Reddit is more important than their career, but that’s beside the point.D’Onofrio and Cox were signed not long after Netflix ceded Daredevil to Marvel Studios. Hawkeye was built around Kingpin and Echo long before Moon Knight was even a consideration. Echo’s entire origin is inextricable from Kingpin, and Hawkeye keeps fairly close to the comics in that regard. She even shoots him in the face, which will likely cost him an eye, exactly like the comics.
Supposedly, Echo was part of the original pitch, but they quickly changed plans. I don’t think it got too far down the road.
She probably would have been more interesting than the female character we did get whose name I literally don’t remember.
That works for me as long as the show is open to tying into the larger universe at some point, which should come as a requirement for working on anything MCU related. What irks me especially on the DC side is when the directors/producers/showrunners think there’s some badge of creative quality by not being beholden to a larger shared continuity. Just feels like arrogance.
THANK YOU! I grow so weary of the caping for people who think they are the one director that is too good for a 1 minute scene of fan service/connection.
Fuck Edgar Wright. I said it.
That’s certainly a take. It sounds like the kind of take you’d get from someone who’s never actually made anything creative.
thank god
I like that scene not being there. There’s a hint, given all of the oblique references, that this show doesn’t even take place where the MCU does in the multiverse. Like why does Layla’s dad have to prove that gods exist? Why does steven have what appears to be a very old book on Wakanda?Now without that scene, anyone can show up in the MCU and Marc Spector, who maybe needed in the Blade movie, but I assume Oscar Isaac has better things to do.
The fuck else is Issac going to do? This is his job. He makes money from doing this. Art is fine. But third homes have to be bought.
I really liked Eternals. I really liked Moon Knight. But one thing I liked about either is that they didn’t go bonkers with Marvel cameos. I’m cool if they stay out of each others’ way. I can see both franchises eventually crossing paths since they both have a connection to the ancient world, but it’s not really needed, and a long flashback seems like the least interesting way to go about it.
On the assumption that MK is going to be involved in Blade and that Midnight Sons is coming, I would have been more inclined to expect a Steven Grant meets Dane Whitman and they have a vague exchange.There are rumors that Gael Garcia Bernal and Mark Ruffalo were both seen on set so I do wonder if Oscar Isaac filmed some material that is going to show up in other movies/shows.
After an exhilarating unique heart wrenching 5th episode for the finale to devolve into yet another cookie cutter MCU CGI spectacle punch-fest was demoralizing. Also, tv and movie creators… When you shoehorn in the obnoxiously obvious ‘message’ cameo it reads like “This is your brain on drugs” to your audience. Stop it. The character was representing. Egypt was representing. We are smart enough to understand the significance. True representation happens when inclusion is normalized. Calling it out in such increasingly ham-fisted ways brings unnecessary attention to it which is the opposite of normalizing it. Stop pandering.
I’d much prefer we just pretended Eternals didn’t happen.
There is an ad on a bus in Moon Knight advertising the government agency created to help people displaced by the blip, which was featured in Falcon and Winter Soldier. I thought that was pretty cool.
I kinda hope lots of Eternal related cross over stuff has been cut. That movie was just not very good and those characters are rather boring
Marvel actually has budget constraints, wow!
I enjoyed Moon Knight, but I would have loved to see this happen too. Especially if it was Najiani’s character, which was arguably one of the few highlights of Eternals.
No Eternals? Darn.They really dodged a bullet there…
Everyone loves kingy of course, but maybe that would have left the show overstuffed after all the other great action sequences like…uh…
So how does Moon Knight get connected to the overall MCU universe? The story (while decent) and characters (awesome!) and backstory (interesting) felt like they’re in wholly different universe, which is both positive for being standalone story and negative for feeling like something that barely contribute anything to MCU.I am conflicted here, I enjoyed Moon Knight for what it tried to be, warts and all.
Why does it need to contribute beyond telling a decent story? It’s a big universe, these characters may or may not at some point run into things you’ve seen before. Whether or not that happens, it shouldn’t affect the quality for good or ill.But if you were looking for a specific example of how it could happen: Love and Thunder. The villain is Gorr, the God Butcher, who, as the name suggests, goes around killing gods. He’ll obviously be meeting the Norse pantheon, and the trailer showed the Greeks. It’s entirely possible there will be interactions with (or references to) the Egyptian pantheon as well.There are also links already. The Egyptian goddess Bast is part of Black Panther’s mythology. Moon Knight makes reference to the Ancestral Plane (the purple tinged spirit world where T’Challa seeks guidance from his dead father). If you wanted to join the dots, it seems like Black Panther is Bast’s avatar in the same way that Moon Knight is Khonshu’s, Scarlet Scarab is Tarawet’s, and Harrow is Ammit’s.
It’s probably for the best. Given the lukewarm reception for Eternals, I suspect we’re not going to see much more from them.
Oh. No. What a terrible loss. A team-up between Marvel’s worst show and worst film: alas, what was taken from us by the uncaring fates.
MK was the 2nd best D+ show so far
I gave up on episode three. Maybe it got better after that, but a show that centres itself around Egypt and Egyptian mythology and then shows zero understanding of it, coupled with an unlikeable main with no on-screen chemistry with his nominal love interest made it really hard to care what was happening.
1. The show was made by an actual Egyptian guy specifically to be “real Egyptian” and not fake Hollywood Egyptian. So that would seem to be a strange criticism. (I have no way of knowing either way, I’m a white American boy)
2. There’s no actual love story in MK. Steven develops a brief crush on Layla that she appears to reciprocate, but it’s never mentioned again.3. Oscar Isaac being unlikeable as any of the characters, yeah no. Don’t know what to tell you there.
1. Let me clarify: he may know something about modern Egypt, but he is laughably, laughably ignorant on the culture, practices, and timeline of Ancient Egypt, which leaves us with things like Ancient Egyptians chanting their ancient magics in Coptic, a language that did not begin to emerge in Egypt until the first millennium, three hundred years after the last (Macedonian-Greek) Pharaoh was dead, the nation was radically Christian, and knowledge of hieroglyphs was already lost. It frequently seems to think Ancient Egypt was contemporaneous with Rome (it wasn’t) that ‘two thousand years ago’ is a long time ago when taking about Ancient Egypt (it was, again, already long over by that point), and really I could go on and on about ways the ways they didn’t seem even try. Also, frankly, it might have been made by an ‘actual Egyptian’ guy but what I saw on screen felt exactly like every other portrayal of Egypt I’ve ever seen: I’ll be charitable and say whatever nuance he tried to bring to his homeland was trimmed by the studio. Let’s be clear: foreign white guy with cult followers digging up ancient Egyptian evil and employing local brutish criminals as thugs is not a fresh portrayal; this is the oldest, most overdone story on Egypt. A story about Egypt where nobody dug up anything? That’s fresh. Everyone has done digging-up-evil and we have seen it before many, many times. At least Brendan Fraiser’s movie was fun. There’s a bunch of articles online talking about Moon Knight’s production team trying so hard to avoid Orientalism, which is weird because a central plot point is the standard Orientalist plot point in movies in set in Egypt.
edit: Looked it up. Mohammad Diab directed at least one episode, but the head writer and showrunner was Jeremy Slater, a very white guy failing upwards after writing such gems as the 2015 Fantastic Four film and the live-action Death Note.2. Flatly untrue. Marc and The Only Woman In The Show (do not remember her name) are a married couple facing divorce, and they are clearly upset that their relationship has broken down, and Marc is clearly supposed to be regretful that his own actions ruined what they had.
But there is nothing between them chemistry-wise. At all. They seem vaguely like former one-term college roommates who haven’t seen each other in over fifteen years, not a husband and wife dealing with, y’know, one member’s sudden vanishing and the collapse of their partnership. It is not a ‘falling in love’ story, but I didn’t say that it was: it is still, within the text, a story about love, and how complicated love can be when you’re some kind of weird suit superhero with mental illness (and I sure as shit not going to start in on how poorly that was handled), but there’s nothing there. They don’t have chemistry, either positive or negative. When they are on screen together, there is nothing. No heat, no anger, no aching love, no emotive connectionL just two actors not playing well of one another. (Despite being straight, I think Issacs is either bad at playing straight people or has been dealt a bad hand with all the scripts I’ve seen him in. No chemistry here as either Marc or Steven, no chemistry between ‘added at last second’ love interest in Rise of Skywalker, and I liked him in Dune but he gets essentially no screen time with Jessica in that film to establish any kind of rapport beyond one five-second scene in a bedroom. I’m going to be fair and blame the scripts.)
3. Yeah, sorry, don’t like them, don’t see why anyone would. Steven is a pathetic nebbish, which could be a refreshing ‘fish out of water’ story but whose inexperience quickly becomes grating as Issacs starts channeling Paul-Rugg-As-Freakzoid-Impersonating-Jerry-Lewis every time Steven panics, and also the show makes him an idiot who stubbornly runs around yelping rather than do the one thing he knows would actually be effective at saving his life: we’re support to take this as proof of Steven’s strong desire to exert his own will and control his own body, but in practice it does just make him seem like a dipshit. If he’s afraid of losing that control, then there’s no reason to make him squeal quite so often, it’s just annoying to wtch. Then there’s this baffling pivot where Steven—whom we know is gift shop employee who has been studying Egpyt in his spare time in books (that I feel are implied to be bought from the self-same gift shop)—is somehow ‘the only person’ they can turn to solve an… Ancient Egyptian papyrus origami riddle that requires turning back time to solve despite the presence in the scene of a modern tablet with an astronomy program that could do that without warping spacetime? I am getting off point – the point being that Steven is somewhat inexplicably upgraded from ‘gift shop guy who loves Egypt’ to ‘trained expert’ for which there is a world of difference.
And why would you like Marc? he’s a grim, grumpy stoic who apparently married an archaeologist despite reacting with contempt whenever called upon to acknowledged the subjects, because the show pivots randomly into Steven being ‘the smart one’ and Marc being ‘the muscle one’ because that sure a rich vein of untapped potential. There’s nothing there but frowns.
On top of everything else, the show’s just poorly made. The CGI is awful, the fight scenes have the worst editing of any Marvel show, a mess of blurry cuts and unclear geography, and its the worst-lit MArvel produc since Captain Marvel, edging out the Eternals.The pacing is appalling, dragging itself around without any clear internal sense of tension: oh no, Bad Guy is digging up the evil tomb, which will take… an unspecified amount of time, and these can take months and years and why are we running around quite so much the physical act of digging is extremely labour-intensive? There’s a stupid, STUPID ‘trial’ where Konshu’s plan is to shout very loud and then oh, wow, that didn’t win-over the other gods for some reason, why were they not swayed by the total lack of evidence or argument or making a single cogent point beyond ‘BUT HE’S EVIL BECAUSE I AM SAYING IT LOUDLY!’
On and on and on.
But hey, I gave up after episode three. Maybe 4-6 really turns things around – I mean, I thought Lower Decks Season 1 was dogshit until its seventh episode sudden stopped doing everything that sucked and the show magically transformed into a really good Star Trek show.
So, y’know, stranger things have happened.
But from the first three episodes, I see no sign of anything worth recommending, much less enjoying.
Good thing they saved all that budget for the final battle when Mark/Steven blacked out and we skipped over the end of it all. Very worth it.
Eternals should have been 2 seasons of show to give them time to have actual characters.