How does Kingpin in ‘Hawkeye’ differ from Netflix’s ‘Daredevil’?

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Hawkeye and Spider-Man: No Way Home.

Following the big cliffhanger of last week’s penultimate episode, today’s Hawkeye finale sees Vincent D’Onofrio properly make his triumphant return as Wilson Fisk. The Kingpin of course originated on Netflix’s Daredevil and was last seen in the gritty show’s third season back in 2018. Now that he’s being brought into the PG-13 world of the wider MCU, there have been some changes made to the character. But how does Disney Plus Kingpin differ from Netflix Kingpin?

For starters, Hawkeye has revealed a whole other side to Fisk’s criminal enterprise than we previously knew about. Though Matt Murdock and his allies thoroughly investigated the Kingpin’s empire of crime in Daredevil, we’ve never heard any mention of the Tracksuit Mafia before, even though Fisk’s clearly been in charge of the gang for a long while.

The bigger revelation, though, is the addition of Maya Lopez to his life. It’s still unclear whether they’re actually related, but Maya has known Fisk all her life as a loving uncle and the finale depicts him as genuinely caring for her, even though he did order the hit on her father. Daredevil only showed Fisk having affection for two people in life: his late mother and his wife, Vanessa.

On a lesser scale, Fisk’s fashion sense is also a little different as, for the bulk of the episode, he wears a red Hawaiian shirt underneath his iconic white suit. Like his familial connection to Maya, however, this incongruous look is also borrowed from the comics — Fisk wore an identical outfit in Spider-Man: Family Business.

Despite these changes, it does seem like the intention is that this is the same Kingpin from Netflix’s Defenders-verse. And with Charlie Cox’s Murdock cameoing in Spider-Man: No Way Home, we can now officially say that Daredevil has been well and truly folded into the MCU. As for that shocking cliffhanger involving Fisk’s fate, we can likely expect that to resolve in the upcoming Echo spinoff series.