One is a power-hungry supervillain who doesn’t know the meaning of the word cancelled, and the other is… Well, you can probably see where I’m going with that. Yes, much like a certain former POTUS (who may have switched to a KFC brand of makeup), Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin is about to launch another bid to become the MCU’s biggest bad in Daredevil: Born Again, several years after we thought we’d seen the last of him when Daredevil was cancelled by Netflix.
Following on from his roles in Hawkeye and Echo, Wilson Fisk is unleashing his most diabolical scheme yet that proves more than ever before just how truly evil he is: he’s becoming a politician. As teased in Echo‘s post-credits scene, Kingpin is set to run for office in Born Again and will be embarking on a campaign to get himself elected Mayor of New York. Naturally, this is going to lead to some very smart and incisive political commentary from Marvel and not just some low-hanging MAGA gags.
Oh wait, I spoke too soon. The latest set photos as filming continues in New York capture Matt Murdock himself Charlie Cox betraying his on-screen alter ego by light-heartedly donning a Fisk campaign cap during a shooting break. As the pictures make clear, Fisk will have his very own thinly veiled twist on Trump’s infamous slogan in the series, with the cap reading “Fisk Can Fix It.”
As for what exactly the “it” the hat’s referring to is, we may know the answer. If the comics storyline is anything to go by, Fisk is due to build his campaign around his militant anti-vigilante policy, blaming much of the city’s problems on the rise of costumed crime-fighters in recent years. Naturally, this will make him more dangerous to Daredevil and the Defenders than ever. By the looks of things, Kingpin will only gain more credibility when masked serial killer Muse takes to the streets to cause carnage. If Daredevil can’t gain the upper hand, it looks like Kingpin could win this election bigly.
This isn’t the first time Kingpin has been portrayed as Marvel’s Trump
Although this is easily the most overt instance of Kingpin’s character being used as an analogue for Donald Trump, it’s not actually the first time. Daredevil season 3 showrunner Eric Oleson slyly admitted to Polygon in 2018 that he viewed Fisk as the kind of powerful man who manipulated the media for his own means, comparing him to Vladimir Putin and a certain unnamed American individual.
As Oleson described, Fisk is someone who would “attack or encourage attacks on the press or try to undermine freedom of speech in their quest for power. I very much saw Wilson Fisk in that vein… He is very much operating on par with the techniques of Vladimir Putin or… some other villains who may or may not be living in our country right now.”
Of course, although the series is currently in production, many months ahead of the 2024 presidential election, it won’t air until sometime in 2025, so its political references may hit slightly differently at that point, whatever happens. With Marvel’s TV series in a transitional phase right now, amid many creative shakeups, Daredevil: Born Again really needs to be something special in order to set the MCU on the small-screen back on track. In short, it needs to make Marvel great again. Whether Feige can fix it or not, though, we’ll have to wait and see.