With its iconic skyline, familiar streets and bustling, densely populated boroughs, it is no wonder that so many movies and TV shows choose New York City as their setting. Whether it is gangsters, aliens, lost children, crime waves or superheroes, they all seem to end up taking the city as their playground for two to three hours, leading to widescale on-screen destruction and races against time to save the world. To flesh that point out a little further, so far, just under half of the movies and TV shows set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe have centered on stories set in New York, from The Incredible Hulk in 2008 all the way through to Spider-Man: Now Way Home, which set its finale on the staple location of the Statue of Liberty. However, it looks like that is all that is about to change.
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According to Moon Knight star Oscar Isaac, the city of New York is just too crowded with superheroes, which is why the new Marvel series takes place in London, another popular movie destination but one that has not been saturated within the MCU. While talking at a virtual press conference ahead of the show’s release next week, Isaac spoke about the different locations used in the series that steer clear of the crowded streets of NYC. He said:
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“I don’t know… well, it was set in London and when I asked why, it was like, ‘We just have too many characters in New York…’ So, it seems like, let’s just change it up… I mean, I love English humor, like The Office and Stath Lets Flats… There’s just so much of that humor that I find so funny, and I thought, ‘There’s an opportunity here to maybe make something… what if we make him English?’ I was like, ‘What if Peter Sellers was approached for with a Marvel project? What would he do?’ So I started thinking about that, and that led me to Karl Pilkington from An Idiot Abroad. And not so much for the accent, but just for his sense of humor where he doesn’t know that he’s being funny.”
Marvel Movies Have Given The Big Apple a Lot of Screen Time
Since the MCU kicked off in 2008, no less than 12 projects have been primarily set in New York City, with others mentioning it or featuring flashback scenes. So far, those projects have been The Incredible Hulk, Captain America: The First Avenger, Iron Man 2, Avengers, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Hawkeye, and Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Of course, if that is expanded to other Marvel projects, then you can also add to that list most of the former Netflix series such as Daredevil and Jessica Jones, the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy, Fantastic Four, X-Men and many more. As a lot of these characters are now heading into the MCU in one way or another, it is not likely New York City is going to fade into the background completely, but we should expect to see many global locations being utilized in the future.
Moon Knight is setting itself up to be a whole new entity in the MCU. As well as seemingly focusing on its own story rather than incorporating itself into the other storylines currently in progress elsewhere, it has also spread out from the much-used locations of past movies and series and is heading to global locations that fit with the character and the mythology of the show. How all of these come together on-screen will be seen when Moon Knight makes its debut on Disney+ on March 30.
