It looks like the highly anticipated “Daredevil: Born Again” series will get stripped down to the bone and built back up again from scratch after Marvel opted for a serious creative overhaul…
“Daredevil: Born Again” — the highly anticipated series that will see Charlie Cox return as the Man Without Fear — has undergone a major creative overhaul after several episodes of the new shoe had already been filmed.
The 18-episode series, which was announced at San Diego Comic Con 2022, was the first show that Marvel intended to produce that carried over characters that previously appeared on Netflix. The streamer had the rights to several series including “Daredevil,” “Jessica Jones” and “Luke Cage” but then all were abruptly cancelled after Disney announced plans to launch its own streaming service dubbed Disney+.
The rights to those shows and characters eventually reverted back to Marvel and the studio began developing plans to reintroduce Cox as Daredevil — after he made a brief appearance in “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” — as well as Vincent D’Onofrio reprising his role as Wilson Fisk aka The Kingpin after he made a stunning return during the “Hawkeye” series.
“Daredevil: Born Again” was already deep into production with several episodes shot when the writer’s strike started, which shut down filming on the series. While there was downtime, Marvel executives including Kevin Feige began reviewing footage and quickly realized that “Daredevil: Born Again” just wasn’t going to work in its current incarnation.
The series was reportedly just a legal drama where Matt Murdoch served as an attorney and apparently, he didn’t even show up in the Daredevil costume until the fourth episode.
So Marvel fired head writers Chris Ord and Matt Corman while also releasing all of the directors previously hired to lead episodes in the first season. Marvel is still searching for a new creative leader for “Daredevil: Born Again,” although some scenes previously shot for the series will still be used — just in a different fashion with the new version of the series.
According to reports, Marvel will also be overhauling the way the studio makes all television series moving forward after previously greenlighting a project and allowing production to start and finish before looking at the flaws and then going back to fix problems with additional reshoots.
Now Marvel is expected to actually hire showrunners for future TV series — a practice that didn’t happen before — and the creative vision for a show will have to be mapped out before the studio gives the go ahead to get into production. Clashes over the creative direction has seemingly doomed past shows including the recent “Secret Invasion” series that became one of Marvel’s worst reviewed projects under Feige’s tenure.
Marvel also plans to hire executives to specifically oversee television projects rather than the current agenda where film executives crossover to dive into TV as well. The hope is with showrunners in place — a traditional TV model — Marvel will not only be able to understand exactly where a series is going before a day of filming ever takes place but the creative vision for the shows will be mapped out entirely.
In the long term, Marvel wants to start developing longer running TV series that will go for multiple seasons and help character development as well as crossover potential, which was a huge part in building the Marvel Cinematic Universe on the film side of the business.
With the ongoing actor’s strike still in place, Marvel will continue working on “Daredevil: Born Again” with hopes that a showrunner and a full creative vision for the series will get laid out before filming begins again.
