When we first met Daredevil in live-action, we were treated to a painfully mediocre blockbuster starring Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner. It was a decent-sized hit at the box office after earning $180 million on a $78 million budget, but the reaction was muted to put it lightly.
Mark Steven Johnson’s adaptation came right around the time the comic book boom first exploded, with Hollywood throwing every recognizable property in development as quickly as possible to cash in. As a result, Daredevil didn’t get a sequel, and spinoff Elektra fared even worse, and the character looked to be a bust until Netflix and Charlie Cox came along over a decade later.
The episodic version of Daredevil may have suffered occasionally from the dreaded Netflix bloat, but on the whole it’s held up as one of the best superhero shows to come along in a long time. It may have been canceled in late 2018, but at least Cox has returned to make his presence felt as part of official Marvel Cinematic Universe canon.
We don’t know if we’ll be seeing him on the big or small screens next, but in an interview with ComicBook, the actor explained why Daredevil worked much better as three seasons of television, as opposed to a two-hour film.
“I think all of these characters lend themselves perfectly to the television format, because they are episodic in their original format. The deep fan base has learned to consume them in an episodic format in the comics. The thing I always said about season one of our show was that if you made the movie version, you kind of have to have him in the suit after 20 minutes, and you’ve got a lot of story to tell. And this is one of the mistakes I think the film made, which was that they tried to tell all the stories, they had Foggy, Electra, Kingpin, Bullseye, they had all of those characters in two hours.
We had 13 hours times three before we even bought in Bullseye. It would be really cool to do a Daredevil movie and to do this kind of one-off moment in time, but I think in terms of telling the story, it’s more fun to have more time to do it. The only caveat is that it would be super cool to see Daredevil on the big screen, that’s the only thing that miss out. But even now with movies, most of the movies, you watch them streaming anyway.”
The entire Defenders lineup is coming to Netflix in little over a week, which is only going to increase the speculation that something will be happening with Daredevil sooner rather than later, with Hawkeye spinoff Echo pinpointed as the potential destination.
