Daredevil: Born Again has a subtitle because of an “old Disney scam”

For three seasons, fans enjoyed Daredevil over on Netflix. The show followed the adventures of Matt Murdock: lawyer by day, crime-fighting ninja-brawler by night.

The show was canceled along with several other Marvel Netflix shows right as Disney+ was getting going; it wouldn’t do for Disney to air Marvel shows on a different streaming platform when it had one of its own, would it? But a few years later, we heard the good news: a new show called Daredevil: Born Again would be coming to Disney+, with Charlie Cox once again playing Matt Murdock and Vincent D’Onofrio returning as Wilson Fisk.

So the show will be a continuation of the original Netflix series…more or less. Not all the actors from the original show will be coming back, and the tone will likely be different now that’s it’s on Disney+. As it ends up, those slight differences are part of the plan. In order for Disney to save money, Daredevil: Born Again can’t be too much like the original Daredevil.

Daredevil: Born Again is called that so Disney can pay people less

This comes from Steven DeKnight, the showrunner behind the original series. While he said he’s excited to see Cox and D’Onofrio back in these rolls, he has some problems with the “corporate shenanigans” at play. According to DeKnight, affixing the subtitle “Born Again” to Daredevil is “an old Disney scam where they slightly rename a series to reset contract terms back to first season.”

So on TV, the way it usually works is that the cast and crew gets paid more as the show continues, presumably because the show becomes more popular; otherwise, why would it keep getting renewed? But by renaming the show, Disney can act like it’s a brand new series and reset everything back to zero even if it employs some of the same cast and crew. A nice trick, that.

For the last several months, Hollywood writers and actors have been on strike to address exactly these kinds of underhanded corporate tactics. The writers strike is on the verge of resolving in a way the writers guild seems happy with, so hopefully we’ll see the worst of these practices start to fall off. Industry workers seem less and less tolerant of abuses of power these days.

VFX workers move forward with unionization efforts

For instance, just the other week, VFX workers at Marvel Studios voted to unionize, shepherded by organizer Mark Patch. These workers are now part of IATSE, the union which represents film professionals like camera operators, hair and makeup designers, sound editors, costumers and script supervisors, among others.

For a while, it seemed like VFX workers would never unionize, but Patch never bought the explanations why it hadn’t happened. “Everyone wants a union,” he told IndieWire. “It’s just that no one goes out and tells you — the studio certainly doesn’t tell you — ‘Hey, this is how you form a union.’ A lot of the crafts that we work alongside of were organized decades ago. We had to get over that initial hump of, ‘Is this really going to happen?’”

Before this happened, there was increased awareness of conditions for VFX workers at Marvel being particularly bad, which may have helped speed things along. Alexandra Rebeck, a VFX coordinator on the upcoming second season of Loki, remembered people working 75 days in a row on The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, only taking time off when you “had a mental breakdown.”

“I don’t know how this is acceptable,” Rebeck said. “I don’t know how you can work people like this. It was the first-ever Marvel TV show, it was during COVID, there was a lot of things that didn’t work in our favor. … It didn’t stop me from coming back to other Marvel shows, and those were way better. So I don’t think it’s a Marvel thing, but on a show-to-show basis, things can really go horribly wrong. I don’t want anyone who comes into VFX to end up doing what I had to do on that show, because that is not humane. That is not normal.”

For now, it’s just Marvel workers who are joining IATSE. If things work out the way Patch wants, that could expand to Disney employees and eventually VFX workers generally. We could be on a the cusp of a new era of union power in Hollywood.

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