The tale of Daredevil is a long and twisty one. The original Daredevil TV show starred Charlie Cox as lawyer-superhero Matt Murdock and ran for several seasons on Netflix, where it amassed a sizable fan following. Then, as Disney was ramping up production of its own Marvel TV shows over on Disney+, it and every other Netflix Marvel show was cancelled one by one. Fans cried bloody murder for a while, but ultimately, the ball was in Disney’s court.
And they did eventually lob it back. This past weekend at San Diego Comic-Con, it was revealed that Cox would play Daredevil again in a new Disney+ series called Daredevil: Born Again, named after a famous run from the Daredevil comics. Vincent D’Onofrio will also be back as the Kingpin.
But Cox’s Daredevil isn’t just coming back; he’s now part of the MCU, which means crossovers galore. He already appeared in Spider-Man: No Way Home, where he acted as Peter Parker’s attorney, and he and D’Onofrio will also show up in the upcoming series Echo. And as She-Hulk creator Jessica Gao confirmed to Collider, he’ll also turn up in She-Hulk, the upcoming Marvel sitcom about Bruce Banner’s cousin Jennifer Walters, who gets huge and strong and green all without giving up her job as a lawyer. We even get a peek of Cox in a brand new Daredevil suit at the end of the latest trailer for the show, wielding his character’s trademark batons:
Expect a gentler, funnier Daredevil in the MCU
“Because everything in the MCU is so interconnected, you just had to know that everything you want to do, there are borders to it, and you have to figure out what the borders are before you can really make any hard decisions,” Gao said. “So, you know, sometimes we’d come up with like an idea or a character we wanted to use, but you have to kind of stop and ask to make sure that it wasn’t already been used, or there wasn’t already another plan. And half the time that happened, and you kind of had to scrap everything and start over.”
"I don’t think we ever, in a million years, thought that we would be allowed to use [characters from Daredevil], because we didn’t know what the status was of the character. And then, I can’t remember how, we got wind that he was coming back and that it was Charlie Cox, and we were like, ‘Wait, does that I mean we can use him? Are we allowed?’ And when they told us yeah, I mean, we couldn’t believe it, we thought we were being pranked. We just kept writing him in, and we kept rolling with the story just thinking like, ‘Okay, any moment now they’re going to tell us we can’t use them. They made a mistake. They actually don’t have the rights.’ But it just kept [becoming] more and more real. And it was so hard to keep that secret!"
Matt Murdock and Jennifer Walters are both lawyers, so it does make sense for the former to show up in the latter’s show. They can probably do it pretty seamlessly.
That said, one concern fans have had about Disney reassuming full control of Daredevil is that his new adventures will lose some of the gritty darkness people liked so much in the Netflix show, and if he’s appearing in a sitcom like She-Hulk…yeah, that’s definitely going to happen. I’m sure Murdock’s appearance in She-Hulk will be fun, but when the new Daredevil show comes along, don’t expect it to be as hardcore as the Netflix show.
But that’s a ways off. She-Hulk premieres on Disney+ on August 17.
To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.
Get HBO, Starz, Showtime and MORE for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels