The MCU is the biggest franchise today, dominating the box office and pop culture and the highest-grossing chart. But the famous/infamous serial nature of the franchise required viewers to constantly keep up with all its content, which includes thirty movies, eight shows, and two specials, with lots more on the way, to “get” what going on with their favorite hero. Until Moon Knight buckled the trend, being a complete stand-alone with no crossovers at all with the MCU except for two inconsequential references in the whole show.

Moon Knight is praised as unique, weird, and the best Marvel has to offer. We don’t have confirmation whether Moon Knight season two will happen, only teasing that this is not the last we’ve seen of the anti-hero. Given that Moon Knight is still a part of the MCU, chances are the crazy caped crusader will return, but in another MCU movie or show, and not his own. Here’s why we think Moon Knight should stay separate from the MCU.
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Moon Knight Works Better Alone

Marvel Studios

The MCU is a vast universe, a grand story of stories, a modern mythology. But recently, it is becoming more of a machine, restricting and flavorless, as more and more titles are pumped out, becoming increasingly formulaic and predictable. Moon Knight breaks free of the Marvel mold, being weird and unique and very un-Marvel-like. The basic synopsis of the show is that Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac) is a regular chap who finds out that he has another personality, Marc Spector (also Isaac), serving as the brutal avatar-mercenary of the ancient Egyptian Moon God Khonshu on Earth who fights jackals and cultists. It just gets crazier from there.

Related: Moon Knight Writer Says MCU Needs More Horror and Monsters

Moon Knight is an experiment: dark, grounded, and different from everything one would expect from a superhero show. Because of this, Moon Knight puts the rest of the MCU to shame, even Avengers: Endgame. Endgame is praised for bringing a decade’s worth of content from the MCU machine together in a Hulk-sized smash hit. If Endgame was released by itself, without the rest of the MCU to back it up, it wouldn’t be anything; it would be worthless. Moon Knight builds itself and is great by itself, and actually is better by itself, with nothing holding it back and nothing to hold back. Even the genre-bending WandaVision needed at least three Avengers movies to be close. Moon Knight is judged for itself, not as a cog in the machine.

Not Cameo Driven

Columbia Pictures/Marvel Entertainment

The recurring problem that has plagued Marvel’s Disney+ shows is cameos, and Marvel even acknowledged this in their most recent show She-Hulk: Attorney At Law. Many fans were guessing that one of the Eternals was going to appear in Moon Knight before the show aired, and every week more and more predictions came to divine who would make the “surprise” appearance. But Moon Knight didn’t rely on other heroes that aren’t related to the show at all to keep viewers interested, it stays strictly to Steven’s and Marc’s story as the Moon Knight.

Moon Knight director Mohamed Diab told Variety about writing the show’s script, there were originally two crossover scenes (actually featuring the Eternals and many more), but everyone agreed “we don’t need that,” and scrapped them. Diab explains how they all went through multiple rewrites to include a crossover with the rest of the MCU but decided to make the show unique. Moon Knight proves that Marvel doesn’t have to rely on a cameo-of-the-week formula to be a great show.

A New Type of MCU?

Disney Platform Distribution

After Avengers: Endgame, the movie event of the last decade, a lot went wrong with the MCU during Phase 4. Moon Knight is a refreshing entry in a fifteen-year-old franchise that has grown stale and is in danger of failing. The MCU needs to change, and Moon Knight can be the start of that change. Even with explicit reference to the greater MCU, Werewolf By Night follows Moon Knight in direction and un-Marvel-likeness, developing unique characters and an unusual story without relying on the MCU.

Related: Why Moon Knight Season 2 Needs to Happen

Moon Knight represents everything Marvel needs for fans to rebuild faith in MCU: distinctive interconnected stories that don’t need to rely so much on other stories so that new fans can join and follow along, unique and weird heroes who don’t need other heroes to keep audiences interested because the audiences love the hero, and the willingness to take chances.

Moon Knight is better alone, for the hero himself, and for the future of the MCU at large, and we have to pray to the Disney deities and just wait until season two is confirmed to see what happens.