Fans of the Netflix Daredevil series should have nothing to worry about when it comes to Marvel’s upcoming Daredevil: Born Again saga. There were some concerns that Marvel Studios would tone down Daredevil to be more like other entries in the MCU, taking away the grit and darkness that helped set the show apart from the rest of the Marvel landscape. Thanks to some big creative changes (that stars Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio fought for), that didn’t happen. In fact, according to Cox, Born Again might be even darker than the Netflix version of the series.
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During EW‘s new preview of Daredevil: Born Again, which hits Disney+ on March 4th, Cox said that this new series is exactly what longtime fans of the previous show have always wanted. It wasn’t that way at first, but the creative overhaul led Born Again back into the darkness where Daredevil has always thrived.
“The thing that we kept talking about was, this show has had the success that it’s had and has appealed to a very specific demographic because it’s one of the few superhero shows that is so dark and sinister at times,” Cox says. “Vincent and I both felt like if you lose that, you are at risk of losing the identity of our show. So we really pushed for the show to remain geared towards an older audience and not dumbed down to kind of capture a wider net of people. I think in some ways it’s even darker than a lot of the stuff we’ve done in the past.”
According to showrunner Dario Scardapane, Marvel’s take on Daredevil was initially going to be more of a legal procedural, focusing more on Matt Murdock’s work as a lawyer and how that life operated alongside his work as a vigilante. Cox and D’Onofrio led the charge to pivot back towards something much more similar to what the show had been over at Netflix.
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“It had been conceived as more of a legal procedural, and we really brought it back towards an action-based New York crime story,” Scardapane told EW. “The real trick was to have the DNA of the old Netflix show, but then push it forward into something very new.”
Daredevil: Born Again clearly had a lot of challenges to work through on its way to the finish line, but that was always going to be the case when integrating something that already exists (and is widely beloved) into a much bigger universe. Fortunately for the fans, it appears Daredevil will still be carving out his own lane in the world of Marvel.
