‘Daredevil: Born Again’ Disney Plus ratings destroy expectations, but I didn’t say in a good way

Is Daredevil: Born Again the most-hyped Marvel TV series of them all? It’s hard to see how you could argue otherwise. Despite the popularity of other characters to get their own shows, like Scarlet Witch, Loki, and Hawkeye, the Disney Plus revival of Daredevil’s adventures is one of the number one projects MCU fans have been clamoring for ever since Netflix cancelled the original run in 2018. That’s seven full years of patience that finally paid off when Born Again premiered this March.

In some ways, then, you would expect the opening two-parter of the Charlie Cox-fronted series to break MCU TV records. After all, WandaVision and Ms. Marvel were great but we weren’t exactly waiting the best part of a decade for those projects. And yet, a week on, the ratings for Born Again‘s Disney Plus debut have been revealed — and they maybe aren’t as much of a bullseye as Daredevil diehards might’ve been anticipating.

Daredevil: Born Again Disney Plus debut flags behind Agatha and The Acolyte

Disney Plus (via Variety) has officially confirmed that Born Again violently sucker-punched its way to 7.5 million views across its first five days of availability. For context, a view is defined as total stream time divided by runtime. The streamer has announced that this makes it the most impressive premiere on the platform so far this year. So… that’s a total success, right?

Well, kind of. Disney Plus is very select about what viewing information it shares, thereby deliberately making it difficult to rank its different projects against each other. That said, we can use our best guesses to deduce how well Daredevil really did. For instance, it’s certainly head and shoulders above D+’s previous biggest streamer of 2025 — Sterling K. Brown’s Passenger drew 7 million views across nine days, so it no doubt had considerably fewer after just five.

On the other hand, Born Again‘s performance looks a lot less impressive when you stack it up against what is arguably Disney’s most notorious TV release from last year. Whether deserved or not, The Acolyte is doomed to go down as the nadir of Star Wars on streaming after it was swiftly cancelled following the conclusion of its debut season last summer. And yet it opened to a hefty 11.1 million across its first five days on the platform, far outperforming Born Again.

Still, maybe it’s fairer to compare Daredevil with its own kind. The last live-action MCU show, Agatha All Along, is known to have enchanted 9.3 million pairs of eyes across its first full week. Crunching the numbers, that means Agatha averaged about 1.3 million views in the days after its debut while Daredevil is averaging an improved 1.5 million. Agatha was already more popular than last January’s Echo (which was essentially a Born Again prelude), so that means Born Again is seeing the best ratings for an MCU show since Loki season 2 in 2023!

All in all, Daredevil: Born Again isn’t breaking records as we might’ve predicted from such a hotly anticipated series, but it’s still the strongest-performing Marvel show for a while. Is MCU fatigue just too pervasive now for the franchise to ever hit the same kind of small-screen success as in Disney Plus’ early years? Maybe, and with lesser-known IPs like Ironheart and Wonder Man on the way, this is likely destined to be Marvel’s biggest series of the year. The unequivocal good news, though? A second season is already filming for a 2026 release (and a third is rumored for 2027).