Hulu's Marvel's M.O.D.O.K. is currently in production and on pace to release sometime early in 2021. The animated project surrounding the Marvel villain has flown pretty under the radar with bigger Disney+ Marvel shows dominating the news cycle, and at one point looked to be in danger after Kevin Smith's Howard the Duck show was canned. Luckily, Stoopid Buddy studios have kept the stop-motion production alive so fans won't be completely starved of bizarre, adult-oriented Marvel content.
M.O.D.O.K., which stands for Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing, is one of Marvel's oldest big bads, dating back to 1967 when he was co-created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Formerly the A.I.M. technician George Tarleton, MODOK is a mutagen-enhanced organism designed by A.I.M. scientists for computing and research who, like all great science experiments, developed greater ambition and killed his creators. The series, co-written by and starring Patton Oswalt, follows MODOK much later, after he takes over AIM and subsequently runs it into the ground, resulting in his removal from power and impending divorce.
Oswalt, who's been on a bit of a roll with landing superhuman voices, recently told Collider that the series is currently in the middle of production, and is on pace to air in early 2021. Read his full comment below:
“The episodes have been written. They’ve been recorded. Now they’re being animated. And because we committed very hard to the stop-motion aspect to it and we’re really packing every frame with crazy detail. It’s looking like it’ll be early next year, but I don’t know the exact date yet.”
Stoopid Buddy Studios may be familiar to some as the studio that produces Robot Chicken and the critically panned but successful enough Hulu stop-motion show Crossing Swords. Whether or not that earns it good faith is up to personal preference, but Stoopid Buddy is only the studio that provides the animation. M.O.D.O.K. was co-written by Oswalt and showrunner Jordan Blum, who has nothing to do with Jason Blum, but did serve as an executive producer and writer on American Dad.
This MODOK series was originally part of a collection of shows slated to a pull a Netflix-style team-up called "The Offenders," but with the other shows scrapped, MODOK will have to survive on its own. The premise sounds a lot like pretty much every other adult animated sitcom, but the supervillain hook may be enough to entice viewers looking for something new in the genre. Since the frankly much more promising Howard the Duck series with Kevin Smith is no longer happening, anyone who wants their weird Marvel fix will have to at least give the show a try. M.O.D.O.K. has promise, but bigger shoes to fill with its theoretical companion pieces buried and dead. The wait for stop-motion to finish is long, but maybe Hulu can start 2021 off strong with the creative spark Marvel needs to break up the MCU's tonal monotony.
Source: Collider