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By all accounts, M.A.N.T.I.S. should’ve been a runaway hit. The superhero television series was the brainchild of Sam Hamm, who wrote Tim Burton’s Batman, and Sam Raimi, director of Evil Dead and Spider-Man. Oh, and it starred Carl Lumbly, an actor who is nothing short of a national treasure. However, the series, which premiered in 1994, was cancelled after one season. So, what happened?

According to Lumbly, the problem wasn’t Hamm and Raimi. The problem was that the creatives moved too far away from what Hamm and Raimi had originally written. When asked if he would ever do a revival of the series, Lumbly says it would be conditional on how it was handled.

“I would be interested as long as what we were doing was picking up from the pilot,” Lumbly says during a panel at Space Con 2025. “The pilot was the document. The pilot was Sam Hamm and Sam Raimi challenging the genre in a way, and saying, here’s another way to think about doing a superhero story. An individual who is betrayed by the state. In fact, injured severely enough to have to live his life in a wheelchair, who comes back without bitterness to do something about the kind of violence that put him in the chair. And this part of what the character believed was that you should be able to stop crime without killing anyone.”

“Those elements, the fact that he had African scientists that he was working with, the fact that he was interested in the community, and he didn’t define the community as simply the community of black to which he belonged, but the overall community. It was a noble effort, and I believe that while we did the best we could with the series, the producers who came forward to pick it up after the pilot were not as courageous and did not have the vision. And I’m being as kind as I could be.”

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