The folks behind "Daredevil" were thinking of sequels long before it topped the box office.
The "Daredevil" Marvel Comics series is rich with material about the Hell's Kitchen hero and his love/hate relationship with Elektra, who has spun off into stories of her own and may do the same on the big screen.
"Elektra and Wolverine is so interesting, [as well as] Elektra and the Order of the Hand, when she became a ninja," said Jennifer Garner, who plays the ninja assassin opposite Ben Affleck in the current hit flick.
"Daredevil" writer/director Mark Stephen Johnson said he may ask filmmaker Kevin Smith ("Clerks") to adapt his own brief run as a writer for the "Daredevil" comic into a screenplay, or Johnson may work from comic legend Frank Miller's gritty Elektra "Resurrection" story.
"Elektra is such a dark character," Garner observed. "If you read especially the [Frank Miller] comic books and even after that, she is dark. She just gets darker and darker. I mean, the chick visits her own grave — it's not normal. [In the current movie], this is the time where she is falling in love, so there is kind of this romantic overtone, and there is kind of a sweetness and tenderness that you wouldn't normally associate with Elektra. I love that about her. I love that in this movie you get to see kind of the duality of her."
Another thing Garner enjoys about playing Elektra is exploring a different set of fighting skills than the ones she regularly employs as Sydney Bristow on TV's "Alias" — like using Elektra's two small swords. "It's definitely different to fight with a weapon. It immediately takes it up a notch, because if you screw up [it's more serious]. In 'Alias,' if I'm about to throw a punch, it's much easier to stop that than a weapon that's already halfway through the air, or halfway down your body.
"And also, Elektra is out for blood," she continued. "Sydney fights because she has to. She's either defending herself or she's getting rid of someone in order to go and get what she needs. And that's a huge difference in the way you approach a fight. I mean, Elektra, other than that playground fight, which is a flirtation and a courtship, Elektra is just ready to take anybody down. She's looking for it. I felt that the fights on the rooftop with Ben and with Colin [Farrell] were much grittier. They had much more kind of vengeance in them and looking for the end result to be death."
As big of a fan of Elektra's comic book exploits as Garner has become, there are still a few things she would rather not explore in an "Elektra" solo movie — namely, Elektra's stint as a prostitute.
"When she's an assassin for hire, that's one thing," the actress joked. "When she's, like, an assassin for hire, that's another!"