The biggest talking point for us CBMers yesterday was the news that the rights to Daredevil would, most likely, revert back to Marvel around mid October. Great news right? Well, yes - potentially.
I'll start by saying that a few major flaws aside, I actually quite enjoyed Fox's first Daredevil movie - particularly the more fleshed out director's cut. I found it to be a pretty faithful interpretation of Frank Miller's take on the character. Of course it still left a lot to be desired, but when Fox announced a while ago that they would be rebooting and going with Miller's "Born Again" arc, I was delighted. Fox have made a few lousy CBMs no doubt, but they also proved that they could learn from their mistakes when they followed up X-Men 3 with the brilliant X-Men: First Class, so I was fairly optimistic. The studio has also never been afraid to get a bit dark n gritty with their CBMs, and that is something a character like Daredevil would definitely benefit from.
But as we know, despite almost managing to draft Joe Caranhan to helm the movie, the clock ran out and Fox were forced to allow the rights to revert back to Marvel. From one perspective this is obviously brilliant news - Marvel can take one of their most popular characters home, and get working on integrating him into their movie universe with a brand new origin story. Great, but how long will it take for them to do that? Marvel Studios have a LOT on their plate leading into their "phase 2" movie production slate, and even after that there are several other characters that are rumored to be next for the big screen treatment before Daredevil will get a look in. And even if they do get to work on a movie before too long, what type of movie would we be getting?
Lets be honest, as great as the majority of Marvel Studios movies have been, they haven't really had much of an edge to them.
The Avengers upped the ante a bit with the murder of Agent Coulson (yeah, that's a spoiler, if you haven't seen that movie yet get off this site:), and a pretty nasty villain, but aside from that, it's all been pretty kid friendly fare. And that's worked fine for the characters they have been dealing with, but it won't for ol Hornhead. Of course they could draw from Mark Waid's most recent incarnation of the character, which definitely lightened things up somewhat, but is that what people would want to see? Doesn't the "The Man Without Fear", a hero who lives in perpetual darkness deserve to have a movie that reflects that and takes inspiration from those great, Noirish crime stories most closely associated with him?
Hey, maybe that will all be moot and Marvel will take a different approach than they have in the past. Hopefully we won't be waiting around too long to find out.
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