Three episodes in and it looks like Daredevil: Born Again could finally be breaking a Marvel/Disney curse that could be at the very root of its recent woes.
We live in a very strange time in media when everything is political, yet nothing is. This is especially true for anything produced by massive global corporations like Disney. Any tiny little statement about virtually anything remotely topical could risk alienating viewers and, with budgets so bloated nothing is made for less than $100 million anymore, they can’t afford to lose a single pair of eyeballs staring at those screens or butt cheeks resting on those movie theater seats.
But studio heads fail to realize that a story with no bearings in substantial issues isn’t a story at all. Sure, you can opt for the more universal, abstract toolkit of love, family, and friendship, but even those bad boys are all about politics. You’ll always be saying something about gender relations if you so much as show a man and woman kissing on screen, and don’t even get me started on parents and children.
My point is that (good/engaging) storytelling, even if its sole purpose is entertainment, is inherently ideological; it will always be related to a system of ideas and ideals. Forcing a show or movie to be completely apolitical and sanitized will just make it bland or downright terrible. What’s more, Marvel, and by extension Disney, keeps making the mistake of realizing too late that a given story might offend a section of its audience. So, instead of making it as safe as possible from the beginning (which would be bad enough), it loves to splurge on reshoots and reedits. The results are patched-up, nonsensical productions whose box office and/or streaming failures somehow still surprise everyone. Well, not me.
Every time there is news of reshoots, I know I can safely throw any hope I had for a good, solid superhero adventure out the window, because nine times out of 10, it doesn’t really mean addition, but subtraction. Entire sequences wind up on the cutting room floor — not because they were badly made, but most likely because they offended someone in those test screening audiences. The reshoots serve one purpose only: making the omissions somehow make sense. But you can always tell.
Take 2021’s Falcon and The Winter Solider, for example: The potential for a great show is very obviously brewing under the surface, but the final product that reached television screens felt extremely off — like the storylines didn’t flow or were unnecessarily contrived (sometimes the viewer is just overly critical, yes, but most of the time, and especially with Marvel, the problem is in the material). Scripts aren’t necessarily awful, but they’re so overly edited that the plot is literally lost. We can only speculate about what was actually cut, but the leading theory with this show was that it was an entire plot relating to a lab-grown global virus (remember what was in the air back then?).
Another example is Secret Invasion, created and initially filmed before Russia invaded Ukraine but extensively reshot and released afterward. It’s no coincidence Moscow features heavily at the start of the series and then is barely shown again — it’s also no coincidence that the progression of the storylines is jumbled trash. Accounting for reshoots, Disney spent $211.6 million on a show that became its lowest-rated and one of its least-watched.
Most recently, Captain America: Brave New World joined this exclusive flop club, undergoing costly reshoots and reedits reportedly forced by its villain’s proximity to Donald Trump. It was initially filmed before the president was re-elected. Now, it’s one of the MCU’s lowest rated and lowest grossing movies. Funny how that always checks out.
Thankfully, these recent failures seem to have acted as a wake-up call for Marvel because, if its first three episodes are any indication, Daredevil: Born Again might become the first significantly reshot, rewritten production to actually come out better on the other side (?). And the difference in outcome is down to one very substantial reason: The alterations have been in service of the storytelling and not the audience’s sensitivities.
In fact, in just three episodes, the show has stepped on more toes than the MCU’s latest handful of creations combined. For starters, they’re dedicating a major storyline to corrupt law enforcement by tackling the real-life misuse of The Punisher’s symbol by police officers looking to step out of their legal bounds. Secondly, the season officially adapts the Mayor Fisk storyline from comics, and thus inevitably dabbles in concepts of populism, election optics, and even the relationship between governmental power and legacy/traditional media. In one of its most interesting nods so far, Fisk takes a liking to the newly introduced character BB Urich, an online journalist, in favor of outlets like The Times — much like President Donald Trump has granted special privileges to influencers and podcasters who favor his politics in lieu of judicious reporters.
For reference and comparability’s sake, the season currently boasts a very healthy 86% critic score and 82% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and scored Disney Plus’ most viewed debut week this year, per Variety.
Sure, the show might still go extremely south — a lot can happen in six episodes — but much has also already happened to warrant praise and a mountaintop scream about the pair of family jewels Disney appears to have grown.
Published: Mar 13, 2025 04:27 pm