Grant Morrison has Marvel MCU movie pitches for Dr. Stange, Moon Knight, X-Men's Warlock, and more
The iconic comic creator shared a list of his Marvel movie pitches and... they're pretty unexpected
We’d already shared the news that comic book icon Grant Morrison had a gig with Warner Bros. more than a decade ago pitching movies based on DC comic book characters, but here’s the thing: it wasn’t just DC characters that they were thinking about in those terms.
In the same same newsletter where they revealed their WB pitches, Morrison shared that they’d also pitched on movies for Marvel characters… and the choices of characters are somewhat eye-opening.
“At Marvel I pitched a good Dr. Strange, and I did Moon Knight, Morbius, Warlock - the X-Men alien robot one – and Terror Inc. among others,” they wrote, adding, “My published work is the tip of a vast iceberg of written material that will never be seen!”
That’s especially true of Morrison’s relationship with Marvel concepts and characters; while they have literal decades’ worth of work on almost all of DC’s major characters under their belt, their Marvel output is far more limited, consisting mainly of their extending New X-Men run, and two Marvel Knights’ miniseries from the early 2000s: Marvel Boy, and Fantastic Four 1,2,3,4. They also worked on a Nick Fury short during that period, as well as the Skull Kill Krew miniseries co-written with Mark Millar in the 1990s. (For Marvel UK a decade earlier, they wrote two toy tie-ins: Zoids, and Action Force.)
While the psychedelic Doctor Strange seems like an obvious choice for Morrison to tackle — both are magicians with a love for a good outfit, after all — the prospect of a Morrison take on Terror Inc. (An undead anti-hero who gains the abilities of those he steals the limbs from, attaching them to his own body; I promise you this was a real comic in the 1990s) or Warlock, a fan-favorite but obscure X-Men character, is almost too exciting to imagine.
Even more curious is the timing of these pitches — if it followed their WB work, it means that Morrison was pitching to Marvel Studios while it was building its Infinity Saga. Just imagine how much stranger (and, honestly, better) the Marvel Cinematic Universe could have been had these pitches made it to the screen…?
While we wait for Marvel to retroactively see sense and green light Morrison’s old pitches, let’s think about what is upcoming in the MCU for the next few years.
