Marvel's MOON KNIGHT Series Originally Had a Very Different Main Villain
When the Marvel series Moon Knight finally landed on Disney+, fans were introduced to Ethan Hawke’s eerie and unsettling character Arthur Harrow as the show’s main villain. But that wasn’t the original plan.
According to series creator Jeremy Slater, Harrow was more of a plan B. The original villain was none other than Raoul Bushman, a brutal mercenary and one of Moon Knight’s most iconic comic book enemies.
In a recent interview with ComicBook, Slater peeled back the curtain on the show’s development process and revealed why Bushman was ultimately left behind.
“Ultimately, [Marvel] went in a different direction and the director put together his own team of writers.
“You know when you are coming in to play in such a big sandbox that you are . . . borrowing someone else’s toys to play with for a short amount of time and, at the end of the day, they don’t belong to you. You know that going in, so it wasn’t a surprise at all.”
Slater’s early vision for Bushman wasn’t just as a grounded mercenary, he had a mythological twist in mind. The idea was to give Bushman a supernatural upgrade turning him into the avatar of a different Egyptian god, one that could rival Khonshu. Slater said:
“The goal was if Marc Spector was the Avatar of Khonshu, we were going to take Bushman and make him the avatar of a different Egyptian god and let them duke it out.”
It’s not hard to imagine the heavy, high-stakes action that version of the show might’ve leaned into. But a major obstacle loomed… Black Panther. More specifically, Killmonger.
“The problem we kept running into was Black Panther had just come out and Michael B. Jordan was so damn good as Killmonger in that movie, that he casts such a big shadow…that everything we wrote wound up feeling a little derivative.”
The more the writers leaned into the Bushman-versus-Marc Spector setup, the more it started echoing the T’Challa/Killmonger dynamic, two ideological rivals powered by gods, squaring off with the weight of their respective beliefs behind them.
So rather than tread familiar ground, the team pivoted to Arthur Harrow, a character with a lighter comic book footprint, giving the writers more room to shape him into something original and unsettling. Instead of a brutal mercenary, we got a cult leader channeling Ammit’s judgment with chilling calm.
It may not have been the original plan, but the switch ultimately helped Moon Knight stand apart. Still, it’s hard not to wonder what that alternate version with Bushman might’ve looked like.