Another Marvel property is leaving Hulu. The streaming service has canceled M.O.D.O.K., Jordan Blum, and Patton Oswalt’s adult animated show. Oswalt voiced the titular character, a supervillain grappling with finding a balance between his professional and personal lives. Ben Schwartz, Aimee Garcia, Jon Daly, Melissa Fumero, Sam Richardson, Beck Bennett, and Wendi McLendon-Covey also contributed their voices to the series.
Despite having one of the leading brands on Disney+, the Walt Disney Co.’s streaming platform, Hulu has struggled to find success with its Marvel properties. After one season, the live-action show Helstrom was canceled, and two of the four planned animated series – Howard The Duck and Tigra & Dazzler – never got off the ground. In the beginning, the projects were developed at Marvel Television, which Jeph Loeb ran until 2020, when it closed. Now Marvel Studios supervises all T.V. projects.
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Hulu released M.O.D.O.K.’s ten episodes on May 21, 2021. Critics praised the show’s animation, writing, references to other Marvel properties, and the voice acting, particularly Oswalt’s. The events in M.O.D.O.K. unfold across the Marvel multiverse, and while outlets like Wired liked the show, writer Brian Barrett conceded that “this is not a show for everyone. It’s Infinity War by way of Adult Swim, and it rewards a healthy appreciation for comics esoterica. In addition to Tenpin you get hefty doses of C-list supervillains like Armadillo, Arcade, and Angar the Screamer. And that’s before you even get to the Easter eggs, which would take repeat viewings and an encyclopedic knowledge of Marvel lore to fully clock.”
Oswalt told Men’s Health that the show does feature somewhat “adult” content, citing “some of the violence” and motivations. In an interview with Awards Radar, co-creator Blum said that his interest in the show was to give lesser-known Marvel characters a deeper level of characterization rather than overindulging the series with tons of easter eggs and hundreds of characters.
“We wanted to bring in just the funniest people who maybe didn’t have that background so that anyone could watch the show and stop Patton and me from putting in 1000s of references and wanting to use every character,” said Blum told Awards Radar. “There’s a lot of restraint in not being like ‘Alright, throw all the X-Men in there, then all of the Avengers… Let’s just do Endgame!’ So, we really tried to make it so that the characters that we chose service the story instead of just cramming them in there.”
Oswalt and Blum also wrote a miniseries for Marvel Comics titled M.O.D.O.K.: Head Games to promote the show. In the comic, they establish M.O.D.O.K.’s family in the mainstream Marvel Universe from the Hulu series.” We were able to kind of take some stories that we didn’t get to do on the show that we wanted to,” said Blum. “The version on the show is a little different than the one in the comics so it was kind of fun to like, incorporate parts of the show into the comic book, not just do the show and figure out a way to kind of reconcile and bridge the two different versions.”
You can stream all 10 episodes of Marvel’s M.O.D.O.K. exclusively on Hulu. The streamer is still supporting the adult animated show Hit-Monkey, a Marvel title that launched in November. The story centers around a Japanese snow monkey who tries to take down Tokyo’s crime underworld with the aid of a mysterious American assassin.
