According to the writer, his miniseries drew inspiration from police brutality and George Floyd, a Black man murdered by a white police officer in May 2020, with
the title's premise being "what would happen if the mother of George Floyd hired Luke Cage to protect Derek Chauvin, her son's murderer?" Anderson shared his own assumptions for why else Marvel axed City of Fire, guessing higher executives might have said, "No, this is going to affect our bottom line." He added that the book would have come out after Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of all charges raised against him for killing two people and wounding a third with an AR-15-like rifle, which happened in Aug. 2020 during the protests that followed George Floyd's death.