Marvel Zombies Director Reveals Why Blade and Moon Knight Are Being Combined — And It’s Not What You Think

Marvel Zombies quietly pulled off a very MCU thing: it mashed up Blade and Moon Knight into one character, and in the process, accidentally became Blade's first credited appearance in the franchise. Here is how that happened and why the creative team did it.

Why Blade became Moon Knight's avatar (in animation, anyway)

Director and co-creator Bryan Andrews says the idea sprang from a familiar Marvel headache: animation and live-action often get made at the same time, and the animated side is expected to play nice with whatever the movies are doing. That gets messy fast, especially when the live-action plans keep shifting.

"Sometimes you're doing it concurrently [with the films], you have to chase whatever they're doing in the live action and honor what they're trying to do. That makes it really difficult. So, we wanted to free ourselves from all that."

When they first put Blade into the show, Andrews and team assumed the Mahershala Ali Blade movie would already be out and define the character's MCU setup. That did not happen. Ali did show up as Blade in the Eternals post-credits scene back in 2021, but only as an uncredited voice. The solo movie was announced and then delayed so many times it eventually dropped off Marvel's release calendar.

So the Marvel Zombies crew made a hard left: they combined Blade and Moon Knight into a single character, nicknamed Blade Knight, and made him the Fist of Khonshu. Moon Knight had just headlined his own series with Oscar Isaac in 2022, so general audiences already knew the Khonshu mythology. By reframing Blade through that lens, the animated series could build its own rules without waiting on the films.

As Andrews put it, once they stopped chasing continuity, the character evolved: Blade Knight picked up his own voice and quirks and turned into its own lore.

The weird MCU footnote

Because Ali's Eternals cameo went uncredited and the Blade movie is still in limbo, Marvel Zombies ends up being Blade's first credited MCU project. It's a technicality, but a fun one: the first time Blade gets his name in the actual credits, it is as a Khonshu-powered hybrid in an animated spinoff.

• Todd Williams voices Eric Brooks/Blade Knight in Marvel Zombies.
• Moon Knight's MCU debut was the 2022 Disney+ series starring Oscar Isaac.
• All four episodes of Marvel Zombies are streaming now on Disney+.
• Andrews developed the show with executive producer Brad Winderbaum; the Blade/Moon Knight blend let them, in Andrews' words, do their own thing and create their own lore.
• Andrews discussed the decision in an interview with DiscussingFilm.