The Surprising Reason Marvel Studios Decided to Make Daredevil Canon

With almost two dozen distinct films interlaced with a main plot over more than ten years, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is an unmatched film series. Marvel TV also debuted a number of series at that time, including Runaways, Netflix’s Daredevil, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and more. All of these programs included small Easter Eggs for the larger MCU, and some of the biggest cameos, such as Lady Sif and Nick Fury, were there. This gave people the impression that these programs were part of the larger narrative as well. But they also have massive differences from the MCU. Most noticeably, Agent Phil Coulson died in Avengers (2012) but was resurrected on television. He went on to have a long series of adventures. But as recently as 2021, the Disney+ show Loki made it clear that Coulson is pushing up daisies.

Kevin Feige, the head of Marvel Studios, utterly squashed the idea that the Marvel TV shows were canon in an interview back in 2019. Feige discussed the upcoming Disney+ series as a significant part of the canon and a new direction the MCU was taking. “After Endgame, thinking, ‘What can we do next?’ Disney+ is going to give us this opportunity to tell even deeper stories with characters you already know and love… in a new type of cinematic way that we haven’t done before,” Feige told Omelete at CCXP Brazil. “We’ve already started shooting two of them, and they’re very, very special. And it all, for the first time, will interlink. So, the MCU will be on your TV screen at home on Disney+, interconnect with the movies, and go back and forth. It’s exciting to expand the MCU into even bigger and better heights.” That’s right. He said the previous shows were never connected to the MCU. But that was before the debacle of Phase 4.

Much has been said about how Echo, which debuted on Disney+, brought the Marvel Cinematic Universe back to the gritty criminal world that was once the show’s mainstay. Thanks to characters like Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin and Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock/Daredevil the show repositioned Marvel’s canonical context to that time. However, D’Onofrio claims that Marvel had to reevaluate how it was approaching the failing Daredevil resurrection before that drive started.

The most recent in a string of maturing issues for Marvel television is the Daredevil makeover. The company that dominated the cinema business in the 2010s has released almost 50 hours of TV programming since launching the Emmy-winning WandaVision in January 2021. The studio built a small-screen division from the bottom up during the pandemic.

The company rejected the conventional TV-making model throughout. Instead of hiring pilots, it spontaneously produced whole TV seasons worth over $150 million. It relied on film executives to oversee its shows instead of hiring showrunners. Additionally, it turned to postproduction and reshoots, just like Marvel does with its films, to address any issues.

But the issues Marvel’s newest project became apparent quickly when Daredevil: Born Again, a Marvel Studios production, was put on hold in mid-June due to a writers’ strike. Though less than half of the 18 episodes of the series had been filmed, it was still enough for Kevin Feige, the head of Marvel, and other executives to watch the video and conclude with cold clarity that the show wasn’t working.

Thus, as part of a major creative relaunch of the series, Marvel secretly fired head writers Chris Ord and Matt Corman in late September and freed the directors for the rest of the season.

Marvel intends to correct the course of a project with extremely high expectations with a new direction. Daredevil is the first from Marvel to have a successful three-season Netflix series. However, according to reports, Corman and Ord created a legal procedure that was far different from the action-packed, violent Netflix version. It wasn’t until the fourth episode when Cox appeared in costume. Marvel had to reconsider the initial plan after giving the proposal the go-ahead.

After the first footage fell short of Marvel Studios’ expectations, Daredevil: Born Again, starring D’Onofrio and Charlie Cox, decided to start over and rework its original 18-episode script in September 2023. After Dario Scardapane, the writer of The Punisher, was appointed as the new showrunner, it was quickly determined that the closed-off Marvel universe that had previously existed on Netflix would become canonical MCU material.

“During our restart of all the creative on Daredevil: Born Again, all the creatives got together and said, ‘Look, this is how we’ve got to do it now,’” Vincent D’Onofrio recently told the Hollywood Reporter about the decision to bring the Netflix shows into the MCU. “So we are for sure only speaking about it in terms of being directly connected to the original Daredevil, and that’s a great thing. It brings in a lot of cool stories and all the collateral story that happened in those original three seasons.”

This marks the conclusion of a lengthy and peculiar storyline that saw six different Netflix Marvel series make sporadic allusions to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But they always felt isolated from the main universe and were never specifically referenced in the films. Then, with two distinct Matt Murdoch appearances in Spider-Man: No Way Home and She-Hulk, as well as the revelation of Kingpin as the main antagonist of the entire Hawkeye series, Disney began translating them over in earnest in recent years. He now co-stars in Echo.

Given that everything we’ve heard about Born Again’s reset has been around bringing it in line with the gritty, action-packed tone of the original Netflix series, this isn’t shocking. As we wait to see what Daredevil: Born Again will become, Marvel and Disney have already hinted at the appropriate times and locations for incorporating all of those original stories into their purported Sacred Timeline. After a series that fundamentally altered Marvel’s television goals all those years ago, it is still unclear how much the new show’s stories will benefit from the official MCU seal of approval.

What do you think? Are you happy to hear Marvel Studios will bring the Netflix series in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

Source: The Hollywood Reporter