Daredevil: Born Again had a tumoltuous development process. The series was meant to be a soft reboot of Netflix's Daredevil, utilizing certain elements from it (mainly its stars, Charlie Cox and Vincent D'Onofrio), while still technically being a new beginning for the Man Without Fear. However, deep into filming Season 1's first few episodes, the series was taken back to the drawing board.
New creatives were brought on board, and the show was retooled as Season 4 of Netflix's Daredevil. From that, Born Again was able to bring back beloved characters like Elden Henson's Foggy Nelson, Deborah Ann Woll's Karen Page and Jon Bernthal's Punisher. The move paid off, as the series received a warm critical reception. Still, despite its success, the mystery of what the project's original version could have been lingers.
Now, Charlie Cox has provided a fascinating detail about the show's first iteration. The actor appared on Deadline's Crew Call podcast alongside Born Again showrunner Dario Scardapene to discuss the Disney+ series. During the conversation, the topic of the show's retooling came up, and Cox explained the original plan to have Foggy Nelson killed off-screen. While delving into the topic, the actor revealed Born Again was originally supposed to take advantage of the variants concept introduced in the Loki TV series (at the 9:40 mark):
"One of the things the original team wanted to do was, they wanted to keep Vincent [D'onofrio] and I. They wanted to keep us. They didn't want to alienate an audience that hadn't watched the show. So, they wanted it to kind of be a reset. So there was a kind of a conversation about it being almost like a variant, you know, in the 'Loki' show, we talk about these variants. It was almost like a variant; and we never said that, but it was almost like a variant. So, it was another version of these characters existing in a world."
Cox then explained why the concept didn't work: "That's a valid choice, it's a fun idea. The problem became that, we found that, whenever I said something that was in contrast to what we had shot in the past, people thought I was lying. They didn't think it was a variant; they thought I was being disingenuous. It was a nice idea, it just didn't pan out."
Lastly, he further clarified why the original plan was to kill Foggy off-screen: "That's why we didn't see the Foggy death. It was because they were trying not to tie the old show with the new show, so that people [didn't feel like], 'Well, I don't know who this person is; I don't want to watch it.' So, if it was off-camera, the idea would be that you understood the emotion, and you didn't have to know the context."
There's an important distinction to make here. The actor did not necessarily say the original series planned to address the existence of variants directly. Instead, it appears he meant the show was going to use the concept of variants as an explanation for audiences familiar with the previous Daredevil series. As in, Matt Murdock and Kingpin were going to be variants of their Netflix counterparts, hence justifying why they looked the same even though they were technically different versions of the characters we'd seen before.
Having said that, the idea of Daredevil: Born Again, as grounded as it is, making use of a concept introduced in a project as larger-than-life as Loki, is exciting. It's a glimpse into the unexpected ways in which a cinematic universe can play around with its lore among different projects.
Ultimately, the decision to drop the idea and rework the show was the best one. For all of its perceived faults, Netflix's Marvel TV series were a promising endeavor. Having them be validated by being properly integrated into the Marvel Cinematic Universe is exciting, as it allows their extensive mythology to carry on, as opposed to being unceremoniously dropped into the Void to be devoured by Alioth.
Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 is scheduled to be released on Disney+ in March 2026.