Over a decade before Charlie Cox first appeared as the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen in Netflix’s Daredevil, there was the Ben Affleck movie Daredevil, and it was not popular. The movie was panned by both casual viewers and critics. Cox recently weighed gave his own verdict on the film, which is pretty much in line with everyone else’s.
Daredevil was directed by Mark Steven Johnson and boasted a star-studded cast that included Affleck (Matt Murdock), Jennifer Garner (Elektra), Jon Favreau (Foggy Nelson), Colin Farrell (Bullseye) and Michael Clarke Duncan (Kingpin). It was one of the standalone Marvel movies to release shortly before the all-encompassing MCU came into existence. The movie featured some of the wackiest 2000s-era fight scenes imaginable. Who can forget that Daredevil vs. Elektra fight in the park?
During an appearance at the Middle East Film & Comic Con 2022, Cox revealed that he watched the movie back when he was cast as Matt Murdock for Netflix’s show. “I watched it once, and then I wanted to go and do my own thing,” he said. “I hadn’t seen it before I got the role.”
Cox was careful to point out that he enjoyed Affleck’s take on the title character, but he wasn’t a fan of the movie itself. “I feel like the movie tried to do too much and it was a little tonally confused,” he said. “They had everyone in that movie—they had Kingpin, they had Bullseye, they had Elektra, they had Karen Page, they had Foggy.”
"It was saturated, and it’s two hours. So that was part of that problem. And the suit sucks!"
Watch Daredevil now on Disney+
Despite its sub-par box office performance and poor reception, Daredevil got a spinoff movie, Elektra (2005). That fared ever worse.
All three seasons of Daredevil, as well as every other show within the Defenders series, have now moved from Netflix to Disney+. Perhaps they’ll cross over into the wider MCU in the future. We’ve already seen Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin appear in Hawkeye, and Cox’s Matt Murdock make a cameo in Spider-Man: No Way Home.
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h/t Variety