Hulu and Marvel’s ambitious, four-show animated series slate is down to one show — which will no longer have “Marvel” in its title.
The Disney-run streamer has renewed Hit-Monkey for a second season. The pickup comes more than a year after it debuted on Hulu in November 2021, and more than eight months after the only other series of the four to make it to air — MODOK — was canceled after a single season.
The four series greenlit in 2019 came from the now defunct Marvel Television, headed by Jeph Loeb. They were positioned as an animated counterpart to the four-show Marvel TV lineup at Netflix (Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist), complete with a culminating miniseries to be called The Offenders (playing off The Defenders team-up for the Netflix shows).
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Marvel TV, however, was folded into Kevin Feige’s Marvel Studios late in 2019, and Loeb departed. After that, two of the animated shows — Howard the Duck and Tigra & Dazzler — and the Offenders idea were scrapped. MODOK premiered in May 2021, and Hit-Monkey followed six months later.
With Marvel TV no longer in existence, 20th Television Animation is now the studio for Hit-Monkey — hence the Marvel name being dropped from in front of the show’s title (though the Marvel logo will still be attached to the show in other ways). Co-creators Josh Gordon and Will Speck remain as executive producers.
Hit-Monkey follows a Japanese snow monkey whose tribe is slaughtered as he joins forces with the ghost of an American assassin and they begin killing their way through the Yakuza underworld. Season two will be set in New York. The voice cast features Olivia Munn, Jason Sudeikis, Ally Maki and Fred Tatasciore; Leslie Jones will join the show for season two.
Hit-Monkey is one of two former Marvel Television series that still have a lifeline; a revived Daredevil with Charlie Cox — who reprised the character in Spider-Man: No Way Home and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law — is also in the works at Disney+.
