Marvel Studios’ Daredevil: Born Again is in the name

Any project that is released by Marvel Studios comes with expectations, for better or worse.

More than how Daredevil: Born Again will fit into Marvel’s ever expanding screen universe, fans have a different question of the upcoming series.

How will this version of Daredevil stack up against the beloved 2015 Netflix series?

That’s something which also weighed on Brad Winderbaum, the head of Marvel’s streaming, TV and animation unit.

“If you watched the original show, I hope we created a worthy successor that is an enriching experience for people that are fans of these characters, and have followed them through those stories,” he told The Nightly.

Winderbaum was one of those fans, and even though he understood the “business side of things behind the scenes” as to why the original series was cancelled after three seasons, he knew he wanted more of Matt Murdock’s devil of Hell’s Kitchen.

With the release of Daredevil: Born Again, Marvel has thrown open a door many thought slammed shut in 2019.

Here’s how it went down. In the pre-Disney+ streaming era, Marvel’s TV unit inked a deal with Netflix in 2013. At the time, Netflix was a fledgling player in the original programming game and the comic book powerhouse’s TV ambitions were largely limited to Disney’s US broadcast network, ABC.

A hook-up made sense, under the then-head of Marvel TV, Jeph Loeb. The shows referenced events and characters from the Marvel movies, but never vice versa.

Six shows featuring these “street-level” New York City-based characters were created under the partnership – Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, The Defenders and The Punisher, totalling 13 seasons over four years.

When Disney was ramping up to launch its own streaming platform, it no longer made sense to have its valuable intellectual property effectively on-loan to a rival. The axe came down and the Marvel-Netflix partnership was over.

With the exception of Iron Fist and maybe The Defenders, the shows were popular and acclaimed, and Daredevil, with the character’s long history in the comic books, was chief among them.

The character had been adapted before, played by Ben Affleck in a critically derided 2003 movie. But the 2015 iteration was raw and violent. It featured gritty hand-to-hand combat action sequences and became known for its elaborate one-shot set-pieces, usually set in a hallway with Daredevil fending off dozens of fighters.

It also reckoned with the character’s vigilantism and desire for vengeance in balance with his day-job as a lawyer and his deep Catholic beliefs. English actor Charlie Cox, to fans, became the definitive screen Matt Murdock/Daredevil, while the character’s nemesis, crime lord Wilson Fisk, was memorably embodied by an imposing Vincent D’Onofrio.

That’s the legacy Daredevil: Born Again has to contend with.

It helps that Cox and D’Onofrio both returned for the project, having reprised the characters already in a handful of Marvel titles (Cox in Spider-Man: No Way Home, She-Hulk and Echo, D’Onofrio in Hawkeye and Echo) in the past three and a half years.

It also means they and the likes of Deborah Ann Woll’s Karen Page, Elden Henson’s Foggy Nelson and Jon Bernthal’s Frank Castle/The Punisher, and their backstories, are officially canon in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

“Everybody, thankfully, was excited to come back,” Winderbaum said. “Nobody knows these characters better than they do.”

In Born Again, Matt has hung up his masked alter ego after a traumatic event which made him question his whole purpose. As Winderbaum puts it, “in the world of Matt Murdock, violence comes at a cost, it’s never arbitrary, it’s usually filled with a lot of pain, a lot of anguish, a lot of grief behind those punches”.

That’s also a promise the series wasn’t “Disney-fied” and it will be every bit as bloody and savage as its previous iteration. Winderbaum said it was to the studio’s credit that there were no limitations placed on the production.

For directors Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson, Daredevil’s unbridled fisticuffs is part of its DNA.

“The original show is known for its bloody violence, but the reason that it’s justified is that it always comes from a really dark, human place,” Moorhead said. “It comes from a trauma or ego or something like that.

“So, it’s not something that only inspires the blood lust inside you, it also has a grotesqueness, you want to look away, aspect to it.”

The pair, who have also helmed episodes of Marvel shows Moon Knight and Loki, studied the Netflix show’s action sequences, even before they had been tapped for Born Again, because as Benson put it, “Some of those one-rs are the greatest one-rs of all time”.

The stunt choreographer, Philip J. Silvera, also worked on the 2015 series. “The man is absolutely brilliant,” Benson said of Silvera.

“He can take the chaos of everything happening in the story, what’s happening with Matt and Fisk personally in any given episode, and give Charlie and Vincent, a hundred thousand thoughts on how they’d be feeling during this moment in the fight and why they’re doing what they do.”

Beneath every action, there is an emotional or thematic foundation. Both Matt and Fisk are struggling with the dualities within themselves, locked in something of an identity crisis and the violence is, partly, a manifestation of that.

“Good guys aren’t all good, bad guys aren’t all bad but the darkness in either one has horrifying consequences that shouldn’t be romanticised,” Benson said.

Moorhead too hopes fans of the original series will find something they recognise in Daredevil: Born Again.

He said, “The hope is that we, as fans of the original Netflix show ourselves, we really hope that it feels like the old show without repeating it, beat for beat. It’s still very much a new thing. Born again. You can take it at its name.”

Daredevil: Born Again is streaming on Disney+ with new episodes weekly