All caught up with events in Westeros? Then you’re probably hankering for another violent tale in which ruling clans scheme and scuffle in a bloody battle for sovereignty. It should be good news, then, that Marvel are poised to launch their latest TV project, The Inhumans – about a royal family of mutants jostling for dominance over their secret kingdom on the moon – in unprecedented big-screen style.

The Inhumans arrives on Friday in 1,000 Imax screens across the US and UK, with its first two episodes reformatted as a 75-minute would-be blockbuster. Imax is an investor in the show, and according to CEO Richard Gelfond, the decision to launch it on their global network of mega-screens is a way of “eventicising” TV. Those towering (and likely deafening) presentations will be a shock-and-awe introduction to the Inhuman universe, before the series arrives on significantly smaller screens at the end of September.

Debuting a new show in cinemas, particularly one about whose characters there is zero brand awareness, might seem a hubristic move. But it does echo the origins of the project. The Inhumans was initially announced as part of Marvel’s expanding cinematic universe in 2014, before a corporate reshuffle saw it reclassified as TV in 2016. Now, weirdly, it gets to be both.

The first casting announcement suggested that at least one executive spotted the Game of Thrones parallels between the Inhumans’s lunar kingdom of Attilan and the lethal political machinations of King’s Landing. Iwan Rheon, the Misfits star turned sausage-waggling sadist Ramsay Bolton in HBO’s megahit, plays the revolutionary Maximus, a non-superpowered Inhuman looking to upend the status quo. As Ramsay, Rheon proved himself a big talker, which is just as well as Maximus’s brother and main opponent Black Bolt – the king of Attilan, embodied by Hell on Wheels cowpoke Anson Mount – is essentially mute, since a mere whisper from his lips unleashes overwhelming destructive power.

The rest of the superpowered Inhumans family hews closely to the cosmically strange 1960s characters created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby: element-controlling ingenue Crystal, amphibious infiltrator Triton and beastly palace guard enforcer Gorgon, who can trigger earthquakes with a clop of his mighty hooves. Black Bolt’s queen is the most wigged-out of all: Medusa (played by Serinda Swan) is a regal redhead whose long flowing hair also functions as an extra set of limbs she can use to restrain foes.

Earthquake-triggering hooves and sentient hair might sound exciting, but the Inhumans has so far struggled to generate any positive buzz. The unfamiliarity with the characters and the neither fish-nor-fowl Imax/TV rollout has muddied the message, to the extent that there is a growing and almost gleeful expectation that it will be Marvel’s biggest critical flameout since the thumbs-down reaction to Netflix’s Iron Fist.

Good doggy … fan favourite Lockjaw. Photograph: ABC

It does all seem faintly ridiculous. The interiors of Attilan look bland, bare and brutalistic, while the costuming and production design manage neither grandeur or grit. The reveal that Black Bolt and his followers will get kicked out of Attilan and end up on Earth also recalls the 1987 Masters of the Universe movie, whose producers, tasked with staging a sweeping war epic beyond the stars, chucked He-Man through a cosmic portal to New Jersey so they could shoot on contemporary streets.

It feels like the Inhumans might be a victim of Marvel’s post-success scramble, now that the company has found itself custodian of the biggest movie franchise in the world and a constantly expanding portfolio of TV shows. If there is one beacon of hope, it’s that the Inhumans includes one of the most beloved characters in the entire Marvel mythos. Lockjaw is a gigantic, slobbering bulldog with a tuning fork on his head and the power to teleport wherever he wants. If the Inhumans survives and thrives beyond its rocky origin story, it will likely be down to that very good boy.

• The Inhumans screens in Imax cinemas in the US and UK from 1 September. The TV series begins on 29 September in the US.