The devil's work is never done
Earlier this week, Marvel released the first trailer for its upcoming superhero series, Daredevil: Born Again. It's been a while since I've been really jazzed for a new Marvel project: Daredevil has long been one of my favorite characters, and I still think that the Netflix series remains one of the MCU's stronger points.
The trailer looks great: a reunion of Charlie Cox's Daredevil/Matt Murdock and Vincent D'Onofrio as Kingpin comes with a bit of a wink and a nod that they've been apart for far too long.
Give it a watch:
One of the neat things about the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that there's a little bit of something for everyone. World-ending stakes? Check out the Avengers films. Chris Foss-infused space opera? Guardians of the Galaxy. Political thriller? Captain America: Winter Soldier. Over time, Marvel figured out how to lean into those sorts of subgenres when it came to translating their characters into big, blockbusters. It hasn't always worked, and when it hasn't, it's usually because the film drifts too far from some sort of core theme and just ended up becoming a bland affair.
One of the franchise's more interesting experiments came in 2013, when Marvel Television and ABC announced a partnership with Netflix to produce a quartet of live-action shows, which would kick off with an adaptation of Daredevil (the rights for whom had just come back to Marvel from 20th Century Fox.) That initial show would be followed by Jessica Jones in 2015, Luke Cage in 2016, and Iron Fist in 2017, before all of those characters came together in a crossover series, The Defenders.
Daredevil was a good starting point for this initiative. Created by Stan Lee and Bill Everett, the character first appeared in 1964 and followed Marvel's usual formula for superheroes: a tragic accident leads to an unwitting everybody (Matt Murdock, in this case), who get some powers and strives to use them for good. In this case, Matt Murdock was blinded in a radioactive chemical spill as a kid, which enhanced his hearing and reflexes, abilities that he used to turn into a street fighter. He went on to fight against crime in his neighborhood of Hell's Kitchen in New York City, while also dealing with his Catholic faith and his actions.
Daredevil got a bit of a boost in the wave of gritty and realistic comics that came in the 1980s as Frank Miller took over. Under his tenure, he infusing the series with pulpy crime fiction and violence with books like The Man Without Fear and a whole bunch of others that solidly placed the character as a troubled antihero. Since then, he's drifted back and forth, sometimes in goofy directions, but by and large, he's been a solid action hero.
After the wild success of Bryan Singer's X-Men and Sam Raimi's Spider-man, 20th Century Fox released Daredevil in 2003, directed by Mark Steven Johnson and starring Ben Affleck as the titular character and Jennifer Garner as Elektra and Colin Farrell as Bullseye. It's goofy and not very good, but I have a weird nostalgic appreciation for it. Garner got a spinoff in the form of 2005's Elektra (and appeared in 2024's Deadpool & Wolverine!), but a sequel never materialized. Director Joe Carnahan put together an intriguing sizzler reel for a gritty, 1970s-set film, but that never came together before the studio's rights ran out.
By this time, Marvel had been on a hot streak after launching the MCU in 2009 with Iron Man. That success wasn't a sure thing: after facing bankruptcy in the 1990s, the company had sold off a lot of those film rights to studios, and was left with its second-tier heroes like Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America, who made up that first wave of films. Now, the studio was working to claw back some of those previously inaccessible characters.
Up to this point, Marvel's strategy was to release big tentpole films that appealed to a wide audience: PG-13. While the 2003 film had that same rating, the character had quite a bit more potential if they could lean into his grittiness and violence. Screenwriter Drew Goddard initially pitched a darker version for a film, but "what we all sort of realised is that, this movie doesn’t want to cost $200 million. The thing about Matt Murdock is, he’s not saving the world. He’s just keeping his corner clean," while at the same time, Marvel wasn't "doing R-rated movies."
Marvel then went to Netflix with a new model. Where the studio's films focused on big drama and stakes, these four shows focused on "street level" drama: crimes that have more to do with stuff you'd find in your back yard, rather than the types that affect you on a national, galactic, or existential level. By not being constrained to film ratings, the show could also lean more on to those darker and more violent moments.
Daredevil is darker and more violent than anything that had come out in the MCU to that point. Starring Cox as Daredevil / Matt Murdock, the first season loosely adapted Daredevil: The Man Without Fear for the character's origin story, before introducing another major antihero, The Punisher (played by Jon Bernthal) in the second season and roughly adapting parts of the "Born Again" storyline for the third season.
If there's one element that really showed that this series was different from the MCU, look no further than the iconic "Hallway fight", a long, one-take fight scene in which Daredevil takes on a whole bunch of thugs.
This was what fans of the character were really looking for when they wanted to see an authentic take on the character, and the television format really worked well for these types of stories, which Marvel followed with Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, and The Punisher. But while the shows had earned quite a bit of critical acclaim (and some significant criticism), Marvel began to wind the entire Netflix franchise down. Daredevil came to a close in 2018 after three seasons, and the last series in the franchise, The Punisher, ended after its third season in 2019.
Behind the scenes, there'd been some significant tension between Marvel's television and film studios. Jeph Loeb had long been in charge of Marvel's TV output and never really had the same acclaim or resources as the studio's film projects, and while everything was supposed to work in one, unified world, there wasn't a lot of cooperation or collaboration between the two. Thus, when just about every superhero that had appeared in the franchise showed up in that big, culminating battle in Avengers: Endgame, you didn't see Daredevil, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, the Punisher, or Jessica Jones anywhere in the crowd.
But with the arrival of Disney+, Leob left and Marvel merged its television studio into the larger Marvel Studios. With everything now under one roof, a new slate of superhero shows could now work more closely alongside the films: shows like The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, WandaVision, and Loki now played a direct role in the coming films, setting up characters or stories in different ways. And, it began to fold in some of those previously unused characters: when Marvel released Spider-man: No Way Home, Matt Murdock showed up for a brief, electrifying moment, and again in the She-Hulk streaming series, while D'Onofrio's Kingpin showed up in Hawkeye.
Ultimately, Marvel decided to reboot the series, announcing in 2022 that the studio would bring back Cox and D'Onofrio for a new series, more explicitly adapting the "Born Again" storyline. Filming began in 2023, but quickly went off the rails: after shooting a handful of episodes, Marvel stopped production and went back to the drawing board: the show wasn't coming together as well as they'd liked, and it was apparently a bit too far from style and tone of the first three seasons.
Filming resumed in 2024, and everyone seemed to be much happier with the new direction. The overhaul brought back a handful of characters from the earlier seasons who hadn't been brought back, and rather than a series of episodic installments, the show's back to having more of a unified story from beginning to end.
This new season (fourth season?) will begin streaming on Disney+ March 4th, 2025, and a second season is on its way.
Since the trailer dropped, we've had an interesting discussion about it in the TO slack channel, and I realized why Daredevil really stood out for me: it injected a needed bit of variety into the larger MCU. The studio's films, like Iron Man, Thor,, Captain America, and The Avengers were all good, but they're dealing with characters called to do extraordinary things: saving the world from greedy weapons dealers, gods, Nazis, alien invasions, all things that affected the larger world. These make for great films, but as the franchise has dragged on well into the double digits, saving the world almost becomes a rote exercise. I have trouble remembering exactly who the antagonists were The Marvels, Thor 4, and a bunch of the others.
Some of that comes down to the quality of Marvel's projects: the studio figured out a formula for making these films: get the characters, a rough script, and see what works when the cameras start rolling, with much of the film constructed, scripted, or retooled as they go. The result is lots of action, but the real work into the characters never feels like it quite connects like it used to.
What the Netflix franchise did was open up a whole world of lower stakes for the franchise. Marvel has literally tens of thousands of characters at its disposal: not all of them are going to be up for saving the world. And, not every problem in the world is an existential one: all types of crime shows up all over the place.
A while ago, I started to pitch an article somewhere that connected the rise of the super violent and gritty comics from the likes of Frank Miller and Alan Moore in the 1980s to the crime waves in New York City at the time. That era was something in response to the tamer 1960s and 1970s, but my gut feeling was that there was a realization and inspiration from some of those pressing problems at the time.
That variety was needed: there's only so many times that you can save the world, and the MCU is well-structured to accommodate that wide range of genres: the aforementioned political thrillers, space operas, war films, and street-level action stories. Variety is good here: it can help keep the stories from becoming rote exercises in three-part story structure and action sequences, and can deliver some new stakes and challenges to one's characters. Daredevil (and Jessica Jones and Luke Cage) are all great examples of this: they're dealing not just with the problems at hand, but some of the ethical and moral issues that crop up when you're punching someone in the face. I'd love to see Marvel take Spider-man down to the street level (which feels like his natural zone anyway) rather than taking on alien invasions.
We'll have to see how this new season of Daredevil picks up the baton: I can't wait to see what we have in store for us.