What a strange start to Marvel’s 2025 it’s been. Focusing on its live-action releases for a minute (although I’m going to need you to stop sleeping on Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man), the MCU got its new year off on the wrong foot with Captain America: Brave New World, which is currently the third lowest-rated Marvel film on Rotten Tomatoes. Luckily, Daredevil: Born Again has come to bounce the franchise back again. And much more besides.
At the time of writing, following the arrival of its two-part premiere, Born Again sports a Tomatometer score of 82%, almost the mirror opposite of Brave New World’s 48%. While that’s a tad lower than the Netflix series’ 92%, the good news is that the audience score, or popcornmeter, is even higher — at 96%, over the old show’s 89%. In other words, this is shaping up to be exactly the victory Marvel was dreaming it would be. And it’s proving that all the doom-mongering after Captain America 4 is based on more disinformation than Wilson Fisk’s mayoral campaign.
Brave New World isn’t Marvel’s reset button, Born Again is
After an extremely rocky 2023, much was made of Marvel using the off-period of the Hollywood strikes to rethink the creative direction it was going down. The result was reimagined movies such as Avengers: Doomsday and a newfound commitment to ongoing TV shows, like Born Again (a second season is shooting now, with a third expected to follow). All this re-strategizing was supposed to put the murkiness of the Multiverse Saga’s past behind us, but then Brave New World had people saying Marvel’s reboot had failed mid-update.
The reality, though, is that Cap 4 is a product of the before times. Although it did undergo heavy reshoots in 2024, clearly there was no fixing a film that had been perhaps fundamentally ill-conceived from the off (a covert Incredible Hulk sequel in 2025? Are we nostalgic for Ed Norton’s Hulk now?). In contrast, Born Again is the poster child of the All-New, All-Different Multiverse Saga. As we probably all know by now, Marvel brought in a fresh creative team after the strikes to take the show in a completely different direction.
It’s still early days for the DD revival, but all signs are currently pointing to Marvel’s decision being a wholesale win, which bodes well for everything else that’s come out of this post-strikes surge of creativity — like May’s Thunderbolts*, July’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps, and the surprisingly stacked slate the studio has in store for 2026. All in all, Cap 4 can be considered a stumble on the road to redemption, not another veer down a dark path. The new, improved (?) Daredevil makes clear that Brave New World was not the franchise’s brave new start after all and it’s taken until now for the MCU to be truly born again.
Published: Mar 5, 2025 03:21 pm