Earlier this week, we learned that Marvel Studios had decided to go back to the drawing board on Daredevil: Born Again by scrapping the initial premise, but rumored details on what the story was originally going to entail continue to filter through.
According to CWGST, "The Trial of White Tiger" was going to be Born Again's first big arc.
"It would’ve focused on Matt taking on Hector Ayala as a client after he stopped a mugging. It turns out the mugging he stopped was actually some corrupt cops who were trying to silence an informant before he could get to trial. One of the police officers accidentally dies in the process, leaving Hector labeled as a cop-killer."
There were rumors that Jenna Ortega was in the talks to play the Ava Ayala incarnation of White Tiger, but this would obviously contradict those reports.
THR's report claims that Marvel execs reviewed some footage from the show while production was paused during the strikes, and decided that a "significant creative reboot" was in order. Head writers Chris Ord and Matt Corman, along with directors for the remaining episodes, were let go, and Kevin Feige is said to have signed-off on a pretty major course-change.
Some elements of (and possible full sequences from) the early episodes are expected to carry over, however, which means the White Tiger storyline may still feature.
The show will be (or was going to be, anyway) loosely based on the '80s Marvel Comics series of the same name by Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli, but is not expected to be an overly faithful adaptation. Despite some significant changes to the story, "Daredevil versus Wilson Fisk, aka the Kingpin, remains the focal point."
Born Again will be PG-13, but Marc Jobst, who helmed some key episodes of the Netflix show, simply doesn't believe Cox, D'Onofrio and Bernthal would have agreed to return if they didn't think it was going to work.
"So I’ve got no idea what they’re doing and how they’re approaching the Disney version of those worlds," he said in a recent interview. "I can’t imagine that Charlie, Vince and Jon would sign up for something that they felt was anodyne. They just wouldn’t do it. So in some form or another, Disney must have persuaded them to say, 'This is a journey worth coming on.'"