A big day for Marvel’s B-list today, as the D23 expo has given the company a chance to announce a handful of new shows featuring some of its more beloved second stringers, all of them coming to upcoming streaming service Disney+. In addition to the Ms. Marvel series we reported on earlier today, Kevin Feige confirmed during a panel this afternoon that She-Hulk and Moon Knight are both also getting shows.
Of the two, She-Hulk is the obvious slam-dunk; for the uninitiated, Jennifer Walters is Bruce Banner’s cousin, who begins turning into a bigger, greener, and much-more-prone-to-comic-book-cheesecake-poses version of herself after a blood transfusion gone awry. She’s also always been one of Marvel’s most relentlessly fun characters, not just because she’s an upbeat, positive person, but because her best series have put a lot of emphasis on Jen’s career as a lawyer. (Unlike most of the Hulks, Shulkie doesn’t lose her intellect when she transforms, turning some of her best runs into a sort of “Ally McBeal, if Calista Flockhart was a giant green woman who could rip a firetruck in half with her bare hands.”)
Moon Knight is a tougher sell—and not just because he doesn’t have an obvious connection to a well-known character for audiences to latch on to. He’s kind of like a Marvel version of Batman, if Batman was a former mercenary with dissociative identity disorder and a magical connection to an Egyptian god, and sometimes he’s a cab driver, and also sometimes he kills people. (Phew.) Given Disney+’s hesitancy to tackle darker subject matter that might tarnish its family-friendly image, we can’t help but think a lot of that stuff is going to get scrubbed out. As is, the character’s most important trait is probably just that he’s one of the only “street-level” Marvel heroes who never popped up in Netflix’s Defenders universe of shows, and is thus free of any contractual obligations that might stop the service from doing a “badass vigilante beats up bad guys” sort of plot.
There’s no word yet on when either of these shows might see the light of day, but if this is the way we end up getting MCU versions of some of the franchise’s less “carry-a-blockbuster-movie-able” heroes, we’ll be pretty happy to take it.