Daredevil: Born Again is reportedly getting a creative overhaul

Turns out eschewing the traditional television model doesn't actually work. Who knew!

By Emma Keates  |  October 11, 2023 | 3:57pm
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Daredevil: Born Again is reportedly getting a creative overhaul
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In what will likely be today’s most shocking news, Marvel’s plan to run their TV arm without showrunners, pilots, or many of the other processes that have kept the medium running for decades didn’t exactly work out for them. Who could have possibly seen this coming? Turns out Bob Iger—who very publicly called out his biggest cash cow’s less-than-stellar TV offerings earlier this summer—was right all along. Ugh.

What is genuinely shocking is the way Marvel is going about its big television pivot. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the writers strike gave execs precious time to review upcoming series like Daredevil: Born Again—a new, Disney-fied stab at the Charlie Cox-starring property that previously ran for three seasons on Netflix. What they found was apparently bad enough to inspire them to start over completely. As in, now-former head writers Chris Ord and Matt Corman were both let go, along with all directors slated for the remainder of the season. The company is reportedly still looking for new writers to turn things around.

Ord and Corman had apparently crafted a semi-serious legal procedural that didn’t see Cox—who plays attorney/superhero Matt Murdock—in his iconic horned suit until episode four. While the former showrunner duo will stay on as executive producers and “some scenes and episodes” will be kept around, Marvel apparently plans to add in “other serialized elements” to the proceedings (likely code for more crossover possibilities or CGI hero fights) going forward. Per ScreenRant, the overhauled series is now eyeing a January 2025 release.

How did we get here?

The short answer is that Marvel’s approach to TV thus far has been, to put it bluntly, insane.

Per Brad Winderbaum, head of streaming, television, and animation, Marvel pioneered their brave new model to “marry the Marvel culture with the traditional television culture,” which apparently just means doing away with traditional television culture altogether. Instead of speculative pilots, the studio would previously dive headfirst into $150-million+ seasons of television with minimal planning. Showrunners were swapped for studio executives from the film side who had minimal to no experience with television. Mistakes were patched in post-production and reshoots, which made directors feel like they “[didn’t] matter.” “TV is a writer-driven medium,” one anonymous source summed up. “Marvel is a Marvel-driven medium.”

What comes next?

Following Iger’s comments and far-less-than-stellar reviews for recent titles like Secret Invasion, the studio is trying something new: doing things the old way.

Moving forward, the studio plans to hire both showrunners (a term Winderbaum says they’ve “not only grown comfortable with but also learned to embrace”) and dedicated TV execs, rather than relying on leadership from the film side. Showrunners will actually write pilots and map out the show before the entire thing is shot. Like Loki, shows will actually get more than one season to flesh out characters and tell real stories, rather than serving as multi-hour movie setups.

Essentially, Marvel TV will (hopefully) actually feel like TV. It may be a little late, but props to the studio for actually trying to evolve. They certainly didn’t need superpowers to see that this overhaul was long overdue.

 
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