It seems obvious or inevitable, given that Charlie Cox, Vincent D’Onofrio and Jon Bernthal are returning as Daredevil, Kingpin and The Punisher in Marvel Television’s “Daredevil: Born Again,” but Marvel brass has now admitted that having previous Marvel characters from the Netflix universe—Iron Fist, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage—could also return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
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“I can’t say much, but I’ll tell you that it’s so exciting to be able to play in that sandbox,” Marvel’s head of streaming, television, and animation Brad Winderbaum said this week to EW about “Daredevil: Born Again,” and re-using the majority of those Netflix characters.
“Obviously, we don’t have the unlimited storytelling resources like a comic book. If you can draw it, you can do it. It deals with actors and time and the massive scale of production in order to build a cinematic universe, especially on television,” he continued. “But I can just say that all those variables taken into account, it is certainly something that is creatively extremely exciting and that we are very much exploring.”
So Winderbaum is basically confirming that Krysten Ritter’s Jessica Jones, Mike Colter’s Luke Cage, and Finn Jones’ Iron Fist/Danny Rand could make their way into the MCU much like the Daredevil universe has.
At this point that would likely be music to all of those actors’ ears. Ever since Netflix canceled all their series, a few years before the Netflix/Marvel deal expired for the streamer, they have all expressed interest in joining the MCU in some form or another.
In 2013, Marvel Studios partnered with ABC Studios to collaborate on Netflix. It ended up yielding six shows, “Daredevil” which ran three seasons (2015-2018); three seasons of the detective P.I. series “Jessica Jones” (2015-2019); two seasons of Harlem’s greatest hero “Luke Cage” (2016-2018); another two seasons of the mystical martial artist “Iron Fist”; two seasons of vigilante series “The Punisher” (2017-2019), and one season of the superhero team-up series, “The Defenders” (2017), that combined all the aforementioned characters minus Punisher’s Frank Castle.
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As the Netflix/Marvel deal started winding down, Disney+ was starting and Netflix knew all the rights would revert back, the streaming giant started canceling all the shows in 2018, all of them pretty much canned by the fall of 2019.
But elements of “Daredevil” have slowly been bleeding into the MCU for a few years now, with Kingpin returning in “Hawkeye” (2021), and “Echo” (2024), Matthew Murdock in “Spider-Man: No Way Home” (2021), and some prominent Murdock/Daredevil appearances in “She-Hulk: Attorney At Law” (2022).
Other “Daredevil” characters returning for “Daredevil: Born Again” include Deborah Ann Woll as Karen Page, Elden Henson as Foggy Nelson, Ayelet Zurer as Vanessa Fisk, and Wilson Bethel as Benjamin Poindexter/Bullseye.
“Daredevil: Born Again” premieres March 4 on Disney+. A second season is gearing up to shoot soon, and again, perhaps it’s inevitable that Ritter, Colter and Finn will reappear. Personally, I would love to see two of these roles recast, and it’s pretty obvious who, but let’s leave it at that for now.