Hit-Monkey is back next month!
Hulu has released a trailer and poster for the second season of Hit-Monkey, the Marvel animated series from 20th Television Animation that was created before Disney took everything over and killed off most of the planned animation slate. The first season was all about Hit-Monkey’s mission of revenge, but now that he’s accomplished that, he’s on a different mission for season 2. This time around, Hit-Monkey and Bryce are now in NYC. Season 1 saw Hit-Monkey go on a campaign of revenge across the Tokyo underworld, taking out scores of Yakuza who got in his way before being smuggled out of the country by Haruka (Ally Maki), who made a dynamic turnaround to be his ally.
Hit-Monkey stars Leslie Jones, Ally Maki, Cristin Milioti, Olivia Munn, Fred Tatasciore, and Jason Sudeikis. Co-created and executive produced by Josh Gordon & Will Speck, the second season of Hit-Monkey is produced by 20th Television Animation with animation by Floyd County Productions.
You can see the trailer and poster below.
“We have been obsessed with Hit-Monkey for about 10 years and actually pitched it to Marvel repeatedly,” Gordon told ComicBook in 2021. “Every meeting we would have up there, we’d be like ‘You guys should make Hit-Monkey. That’s the coolest,’ to the point where they were like, ‘Yeah, I know. We get it. You like Hit-Monkey.’ And actually, they were like, ‘You’re not the first directors to actually pitch Hit-Monkey.’ It’s got a bit of a cult following.”
That’s when Gordon revealed he and speck threw the metaphorical “hail mary” and tried to get Hit-Monkey made. This move—which turned out to be a letter sent from their agent to both of Marvel’s production arms at the time—yielded a meeting with executives from both Marvel Television and Marvel Studios.
“The next day, we had a meeting with the film division and with the TV division,” Gordon adds. “And the TV division bit, and they went, ‘Yeah, we actually have a place to use this. We want to do it as an animated show,’ which made a lot of sense to us. Because the production of it, like shooting it in Tokyo and the level of live-action sort of funds and resources it would’ve taken to really pull it off were pretty substantial. So suddenly we’re like, ‘Oh, wow, let’s do it as a really cinematic kind of cool animated version of it,’ and it all just came together really quickly.”
Here’s the series’ synopsis: A Japanese snow monkey, aided by the ghost of an American assassin, goes on a killing-spree, and becomes the famous “killer of killers.” In New York City, Monkey finds a path to escape his life of killing, while Bryce attempts to repair the damage to those he wronged in life. But what will it cost them to undo the past?
Hit-Monkey season 2 will launch on July 15th on Hulu.
