Marvel Cannibal Heroes The MCU Will Never Adapt

In the ’90s, during a nationwide panic over mad cow disease in the UK, infamous sickos Grant Morrison and Mark Millar pitched an idea to Marvel about a group of people who gain powers after eating tainted Skrull meat.

Surprisingly, Marvel went for it with one small caveat: change the name. Morrison and Millar originally called the team the Skrull Kill Kult—a riff on the band Thrill Kill Kult—but Marvel’s EIC at the time, Tom DeFalco, felt it made the series sound like it was glorifying cults and had the duo change it to Skrull Kill Krew.

The Skrull Kill Krew book’s premise revolved around an earlier story about a group of shape-shifting Skrulls whom Reed Richards brainwashed into becoming cows. Millar and Morrison took that silly story and made it horrific by positing that the group of Skrull cows were accidentally sent to a slaughterhouse and turned into ground beef. Some people ate the Skrull beef and had the aliens‘ shape-shifting DNA added to their own, resulting in a condition called Skrullovoria-Induced Skrullophobia.

This “Mad Skrull Disease” gave those affected shapeshifting powers even greater than actual Skrulls but also caused them to develop an intense hatred of Skrulls. Most of the people infected died right away, but some—while still technically dying—proved healthy enough to form a group called the Skrull Kill Krew, whose only purpose was to hunt down and murder Skrulls. This was usually done by violently “blowing away” the Skrulls with high-powered weapons.

So, to recap, Marvel actually published a comic where humans eat Skrull meat, get a disease that gives them powers and turns them racist against Skrulls, and then go around brutally murdering said Skrulls while slowly dying. That’s pretty messed up, even for the ’90s.

There are numerous reasons why the MCU would never make a Skrull Kill Krew movie. For one thing, it would be incredibly violent. The MCU has dabbled with mature content, and the upcoming Deadpool & Wolverine will no doubt be full of bloody carnage, but most of that still falls under the banner of self-defense.

To make a movie where the protagonists are actively hunting down a minority species—at least by Earth standards—and blowing their heads off with no provocation would be a whole new level of depravity for the still (relatively) family-friendly MCU.

Meanwhile, an even bigger problem exists. Unlike their comic book counterparts, who are almost exclusively written as villains, the Skrulls in the MCU are mostly depicted as good guys. Secret Invasion attempted to introduce the idea of bad Skrulls but did anyone even watch that? All joking aside, the very nature of Skrullovoria-Induced Skrullophobia would cause the Skrull Kill Krew to hunt down Skrulls indiscriminately without checking to see if they’re good guys or bad guys, and that just wouldn’t fly in the MCU.

The team could conceivably be introduced as villains in someone else’s story but headline their own movie or Disney+ series. We don’t see that happening anytime soon.