Late last year, we learned that Marvel Studios had decided to go back to the drawing board on Daredevil: Born Again by scrapping the initial premise.
Marvel execs were said to have reviewed some footage from the show while production was paused during the recent Hollywood 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.
This will likely result in a lengthy delay (the show is not expected to hit our screens until 2025 at the earliest), but we do have some good news to share.
While being interviewed on Comic Book Central, Vincent D'Onofrio (Wilson Fisk) revealed that filming is set to resume "not long from now... in a few weeks, in fact." The actor also mentioned that Born Again will have a similar tone to the Netflix Daredevil series.
It's far from exact, but at least we know that cameras will start rolling again relatively soon.
In related news (well, rumor), insider Daniel Richtman is claiming that Muse is still set to be the main villain of the series. This isn't the first time the serial killer has been mentioned as a principal antagonist, but we had heard that key elements and even entire plotlines from the original incarnation of the show would likely be dropped.
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."
We had been led to believe that Born Again was going to be PG-13, but the recent news that the show will be released under the Marvel Spotlight banner has led to renewed speculation that it will be TV-MA.
Either way, 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.'"