There’s been a lot of behind-the-scenes drama at Marvel Studios over the past couple of years – and few projects have had their issues aired as publicly as Daredevil: Born Again.
Prior to the Actor’s Strike in summer 2023, six episodes of the Disney+ reboot series were completed, only for stars Charlie Cox (Matt Murdock/Daredevil) and Vincent D’Onofrio (Wilson Fisk/Kingpin) to tell Marvel’s Head of Television Brad Winderbaum that something felt missing. This was supposed to act as an entry point for those unfamiliar with the Netflix show, whilst satisfying fans of it, but reportedly leaned too heavily on earlier plot points.
So Winderbaum made the bold decision to hire a new showrunner – Dario Scardapane, previously of Netflix’s The Punisher – and start afresh, with Moon Knight/Loki alumni Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead drafted to direct several new episodes, including a brand-new season opener.
We recently sat down with Benson & Moorhead, Scardapane, Winderbaum and Executive Producer Sana Amanat to find out how they reverse engineered this re-introductory first season from the wreckage of the previous production, which, based on the first two episodes, might become one of the definitive MCU TV series.
How Born Again Was, Well, Born Again
There were several rumours percolating about what had gone wrong with Born Again once news broke that the creative team was getting a major shakeup midway through production. As Winderbaum is quick to stress, the issue wasn’t that the initial iteration was bad – quite the opposite – but that it didn’t go far enough to capture the gritty tone fans expected.
He told Zavvi: “When we paused during the actor’s strike, I kept looking back at what we’d filmed, and as a fan of Daredevil, I felt like we could increase the intensity – pushing the scale of the drama and action further than was originally intended. Getting Dario to come on board was great, as he wrote the Punisher series, and I knew he could create a tapestry with new episodes and scenes that could serve to tell a more beautiful overarching story about Matt Murdock’s rebirth, and his parallels with Wilson Fisk.”
Of the specific, often contradictory, rumours which had been circulating online about the show’s initial incarnation, I was most fascinated by one which stressed that it was originally a straightforward Matt Murdock legal drama. Was this really, at one point, a classic TV procedural thriller?
“Well, there is still a lot of amazing courtroom drama in the show”, Winderbaum added. “Matt Murdock’s identity as a lawyer has always been a big part of his identity, and it’s certainly a big part of his identity here, so that rumour has some truth to it – but you’ll often find him busting heads in dark alleys as much you’ll find him taking cases into court!”
Scardapane may have been an accomplished alumni of Marvel’s gritty Netflix series, but he was still being thrown in at the deep end here, brought on board with the stressful mission of rejuvenating the show ready for when the cameras could start rolling again.
“It was the biggest challenge of my career, but it was also so much fun – I like to say it was like solving a puzzle”, he told Zavvi. “When Marvel came to me to show me what they had already filmed, they were optimistic, as they felt good about it, and it was clear from those episodes what the show wanted to be; it just wasn’t quite there.
“From the episodes that were already made, I had to find a way to give context to the first episode, bring a new conclusion to the last episode, and find a new way to thread everything in-between. We had great tools to work with, but we needed to take a brand-new audience further from where the Netflix series ended so they could be guided into the new one.
“I had amazing resources, including two of the best actors in television I’ve ever worked with, which really helped. Due to how fast the turnaround happened, it was a quick moving train; I truly had no time to freak out about taking it all on until it was all done!”
Co-director of episode one – and several more throughout the season – Moorhead hates the framing that he was hired to help “save” the show, as almost all of the six episodes that were shot before he were brought on board have been reconfigured into the series.
“It’s not PR spin when we say that most of it is still in Born Again, it didn’t even feel that different to most other shows, where you realise what’s working and what isn’t during production. It didn’t feel like we were making a pivot from that series, so much as we had been given a Rubik’s Cube to figure out how we could make this show make an audience feel how they did watching the Netflix show for the first time; hitting that tone was the biggest thing for us.”
Moorhead and his directing partner Justin Benson have previously worked on Moon Knight and the second season of Loki. Despite their previous experience in the Marvel universe, they’ve said this is the first time they’ve felt comfortable when boarding an MCU project, even with the high-stakes nature of needing to help rescue the series.
Moorhead said: “In the independent movies we make outside of Marvel, we tell stories with supernatural stakes, but make sure they’re always grounded in the real world, which in Marvel you’d refer to as “street level”. That’s exactly what we love about the Netflix show, and the Daredevil comics in general; it’s just Matt and Fisk, with stakes that aren’t the end of the universe, even if they highlight the drastic ends these two people will go to.
“It felt natural to go into neo-noir territory, because it felt like we could bring Marvel’s stakes back to Earth. When characters get hurt here, they carry that pain forever, and when they’re killed, they’re dead forever – that felt natural to us, in terms of the stories we’ve told across our career”.
Inspired by Heat and... Midsommar?
When Cox and D’Onofrio compared their relationship this time to that of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro’s characters in Heat, they weren’t lying. In the opening episode, these two men on opposite sides of the law have a tense face-to-face meeting at a diner, and Scardapane wants you to know that this similarity with the most iconic scene in Michael Mann’s crime thriller is no coincidence.
“I wasn’t subconsciously thinking of Heat,” he continued, “I’m going right out there and saying directly I was thinking of Heat! These two men are analogous and bringing them together at the diner was an intentional reference that Charlie and Vincent were extremely on board to recreate.
“At the heart of comic book storytelling is the exploration of the similarities between heroes and villains, trying to investigate the point at which vigilantes become heroes or criminals; they all think they're behaving for good reasons, but who is committing criminal behaviour for good? It kicks off a bonanza of creativity when you have conflicting characters like this at odds with each other, as on an individual level, you can never work out whether their “hero” or “villain” personas are the mask, or if the mask is the identity they present to the world.”
The director duo love crime thrillers and classic noir, but one of their biggest inspirations was a movie nobody watching would assume was an influence.
“Midsommar was one of our biggest influences in terms of the story” Moorhead said. “It’s about the consequences of grief and its ugliness, which is what the whole season is about to us – plus, when you see the shocking acts of brutality, they make you feel uncomfortable, not stand up and cheer like you would with an action movie.
“That’s the best way to present the extraordinary violence in a show like Daredevil. It’s there to make you feel uncomfortable.”
Benson went one step further with the unlikely inspirations.
“Our indie films are described as being cosmic works, and the drama this season comes out of the unsettling feeling of living in an uncaring universe – which is Lovecraftian in a way. There’s certainly a Lovecraft inspiration floating around.”
“Matt feels like he’s lost the grace of God because of what happens in the first episode”, Moorhead added. “Matt’s journey through the entire show has him feeling adrift and unmoored in an unsteady universe – that's the cosmic dispassion you can see in more mythological Lovecraft tales.”
Not a Born Again Adaptation
The third season of the Netflix show incorporated several plot elements from Frank Miller’s Born Again comic book, to the extent that you might be confused as a comics fan why the series would bear its title – surely it’s not just a retread?
Winderbaum added: “What’s amazing about the Born Again comic is how Frank Miller reduced Matt Murdock down to his bare essence, stripping everything away so we could see what was left of him, allowing him to be reborn as a character with a strict code of ethics, leading him into the future as a violent superhero.
“We aimed to do something similar here when it came to reducing Matt to his barest essence, and seeing what happens when all of his morality is tested. Season three of Daredevil played in the sandbox of the Born Again comic, and we didn’t want to reprise those beats – we wanted to tell a different story that would break him down and allow him to be reborn.”
Sana Amanat, who prior to working at Marvel Studios was a figurehead at Marvel Comics – where her achievements including creating Ms Marvel– helped bring a wider frame of comic book reference to the table. More recent runs in the comics proved far more inspirational for the series than Miller’s namesake series.
“It’s not a straightforward adaptation of any one book” she told Zavvi, “but Devil’s Reign by Chip Zdarsky and Mayor Fisk by Charles Soule can be felt as big influences. Frank Miller was our holy grail in terms of tone and style, and we kept a lot of thematic references to Born Again here, but we never wanted to make a direct adaptation.”
Behind the camera, Benson was also resisting the urge to directly translate Miller to the screen.
“So many of the big plot beats from that book are beautifully covered in season three, so any inspiration we took from it came in the form of very particular panels as references for the lighting or framing of shots”, he concluded. “The biggest thing we lifted was his spirit, aiming to tell a really sophisticated, transgressive story using these familiar characters.”
What Does The Future Hold?
Not only is a second season of Born Again greenlit, it’s set to go into production in early March, just as the first starts airing. The only thing the team can tell me is that, as with the first season, you don’t need to watch any prior Netflix or Disney+ show the characters appeared in to pick up on plot points.
“For me, Born Again should feel like picking up a comic book”, Winderbaum added, “you could read it from that issue onward without understanding the 60 years of narratives before it to grasp the story we’re telling. The show is a worthy successor to the Netflix series we hope will satisfy its fans, but also something new that can introduce these characters to a new audience – you might have an enriched experience if you’ve seen them elsewhere, but it’s not necessary viewing, this series stands on its own two feet.”
The fact the show stands alone also means it doesn’t need to wait for other cogs in the MCU to turn forward before it can return, with showrunner Scardapane promising no prolonged gaps in-between seasons.
“The intention is for us to have more regular seasons than other Marvel shows, because this train is on its own track in terms of its timeline and in terms of our production schedules. Introductions of other things from the MCU, or crossovers into their world are TBD; we’re in one corner of New York that’s just a couple of subway stops from other characters, so there are doors open to come in and out, if we ever need to go!”
So don’t write crossovers off entirely, as Executive Producer Amanat stresses that: “We’re always talking about ways we can crossover, even just now in-between interviews we’ve been having those talks! But at the minute, Marvel are happy to support us keeping Daredevil in Hell’s Kitchen and Brooklyn, and that remains the most exciting prospect for all of us.”
Similarly, Winderbaum doesn’t feel the need to connect Daredevil to other corners of his superhero TV empire in the immediate future.
“For me, looking at the world that Dario has created, his version of New York City does feel like a kingdom in its own right, with people vying for power and control over the many mechanisms that exist there”, he concluded. “This is a big, sprawling story which can transform and spiral into several directions moving forward – that's more exciting than having Daredevil visit Asgard!”
Daredevil: Born Again premieres on Disney+ on Wednesday, 5th March.
