Marvel Has Found Its Moon Knight, And The Casting Couldn't Be More Perfect
For more than a decade, as Marvel Studios has taken step after step to become the entertainment juggernaut par excellence that we know and love today, one question has echoed through the halls of nerdery: "Where Moon Knight at?"
Today, at last, we have our answer, as Deadline reports that Oscar Isaac is in talks to star as the eponymous hero in the upcoming Moon Knight series, currently set to premiere on Disney+.
Isaac's casting comes as stellar news for fans of the comic book hero. His layered performances in Ex Machina and A Most Violent Year certainly show that he has the range to play the troubled vigilante, while X-Men: Apocalypse and the Star Wars sequel trilogy give him the sci-fi credentials to take part in the MCU. His next planned blockbuster outing, Dennis Villeneuve's adaptation of Dune, was recently pushed back to a 2021 release date.
Along with upcoming high profile streaming offerings like She-Hulk, WandaVision, and Ms. Marvel, Moon Knight will be part of Marvel Studios' slate of series designed to fold its television shows into the wider cinematic universe following the 2019 shuttering of their Marvel Television division.
Oscar Isaac is coming back to the Marvel universe
Moon Knight, also known by his civilian moniker Marc Spector, is something of a cult favorite character for Marvel fans, owing in large part to his weird origin story. Created by Doug Moench and Don Perlin and first introduced in the pages of Werewolf By Night back in 1975, he's a complicated protagonist, a former Marine and mercenary who stumbled onto an ancient Egyptian shrine to the god Khonshu. Imbued with strength and agility that wax and wane with the moon, he develops distinctive alter egos in order to infiltrate all levels of society, using the information that he gains during the day to fight crime by night.
In later publications, it's revealed that Spector's abilities and personas might not stem from Egyptian deities at all, but may in fact be symptoms of his own mental illness. Whichever incarnation of the character the series lands on, Isaac will have plenty of strangeness to sink his not-inconsiderable acting chops into.
The Moon Knight series has tagged Jeremy Slater, the developer and writer of Netflix's Umbrella Academy, as showrunner. There's been no word on a release date so far, but news of Oscar Isaac's involvement cements the show as a priority for Marvel moving forward.