Daredevil: Born Again underwent a major creative overhaul midway through production. The show's "Head Writers" were replaced, with Dario Scardapane replacing Matt Corman and Chris Ord as showrunner.
Roles were recast (Ayelet Zurer returned as Vanessa Fisk after initially being replaced by Sandrine Holt), and the series got a new pilot and season finale. That barely scratches the surface of the changes, but among the biggest was making Daredevil: Born Again a direct follow-up to Netflix's Daredevil, despite original plans calling for it to be a reboot.
Talking to IGN, one of the show's writers, Jesse Wigutow—who worked on the series pre- and post-overhaul—confirmed that Marvel Studios scrapped plans for a standalone "bottle" episode revolving around Jon Bernthal's Punisher and Alaqua Cox's Echo.
"They were looking to do a kind of singular bottle episode around the Punisher crossing into the Daredevil space," Wigutow confirmed. "This was two, three years ago, and one thing led to another, and I came in to largely focus on that."
"It involved the Punisher and Echo kind of spending an interesting night together — not romantically, but narratively," he teased, noting that the idea ultimately "fell away." Wigutow added, "Who knows, maybe it comes back again. But the story has been a little kind of crooked in terms of the development, and it was part of a former idea."
Wilson Fisk featured heavily in Echo, with a post-credits scene setting the stage for his Mayoral run. Maya Lopez, who debuted in Hawkeye, was largely ignored in Daredevil: Born Again, and while her actions were referenced, she was never named. Daredevil did briefly appear in her show for an action-packed flashback.
The Echo series went through its fair share of creative issues, and while the character's return in the Man Without Fear's series would have made sense, it appears Maya has now fallen by the wayside.
Wigutow elaborated on the changes that were made to Daredevil: Born Again when he said, "I think I'm not speaking out of turn in saying that there was an effort to make the show very separate from the Netflix [series] and kind of a new concept."
"I feel like some of that worked well, and some of it didn't. And there were expectations that weren't necessarily being met, and there was a pointed effort and a left turn — to not necessarily return to Netflix, but honor the Netflix origin of the show," he continued. "It is meant to be more aligned with the Netflix show now."
The writer later confirmed that he's one of the writers on Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 and that Season 3's writer's room opens next week.
Are you disappointed that we missed out on The Punisher and Echo's team-up?