Netflix's Daredevil spiked in viewers after recent MCU Easter eggs
A set of cameo appearances in recent MCU projects has seen renewed interest around the Netflix series
The logic for killing off Daredevil and the other Netflix Marvel shows—as Disney did with vigor back in 2018 and 2019—was pretty simple to grasp: As the Marvel owner got seriously into both its own plans for a streaming platform, and for Marvel-based series to fill out said streaming platform’s library, the idea of continuing to produce content for their biggest rival got increasingly unpalatable.
And, hey: Maybe they had a point, as Deadline notes that Marvel’s Daredevil had a sudden surge in Nielsen’s streaming numbers a few weeks back, making it (by the polling company’s admittedly sometimes iffy numbers) the eighth-most-popular original streaming show of the holiday week of December 20 through December 26 in the U.S.
That, in what was almost certainly not a coincidence, happens to also be a period of time that saw Disney acknowledge, for basically the first time ever, that the Netflix shows might actually be canonical to the modern-day MCU. December 15 saw Disney+ release the fifth episode of Hawkeye, confirming that a version of Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin was operating in MCU New York. And then, just a few days later, Marvel Studios and Sony released Spider-Man: No Way Home, in which Daredevil star Charlie Cox briefly reprises his role as Matt Murdock, superhero lawyer to the (teenaged superhero) stars.
Both of these cameos/stunts/what have you held back from straight-up confirming that the events of Marvel’s Daredevil are canon—D’Onofrio, especially, seemed to be playing a slightly different register of Wilson Fisk. But it was apparently enough to goose viewership of Daredevil. (Not to the same level Hawkeye was getting, though. The Disney+ series scored 938 million minutes of viewership during the period in question, according to the Nielsen numbers; Daredevil put 195 million minutes on the board.) Fingers crossed that the lesson taken from all of this, then, is not “Let’s never mention this crime-fighting ninja attorney again, lest we make our enemies more powerful” but “Dang, Charlie Cox is still pretty damn fun as Daredevil, huh?”