Later tonight, Marvel Television and Marvel Studios will debut the grand return of Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock in his own solo project with “Daredevil: Born Again” premiering on Disney+. After some deep consideration from Marvel, the show is now being hailed as more of a revival or continuation than a “soft-reboot” after the show got some retooling and episodes reshot during a production pause.
One of the show’s stars Vincent D’Onofrio, who plays antagonist Mayor Wilson Fisk, has spoken out about his thoughts about Marvel having walled off the Netflix events and characters (once considered to be set outside of mainline MCU canon) with the new round of episodes after three seasons before Marvel ended their working relationship with the streaming giant.
READ MORE: ‘Daredevil: Born Again’ Producers Say Marvel Didn’t Push Back On Violence, “The Bloodier, The Better”
D’Onofrio stated to IGN during a roundtable interview when asked about the new show’s connection to the Netflix seasons, “I would consider [‘Daredevil: Born Again’] a fourth season, it’s a new path, we kind of blow it up, the past. But it’s there and it’s connected. The way that we finally ended up doing it, it worked really well and I think it needed the connection to the Netflix show. It needed the other characters to come back Everybody needed all the familiar faces. The other iteration wouldn’t have had that.”
While they were going in a different direction before and a good amount of cast members weren’t coming back due to those severed connections to the Netflix episodes, D’Onofrio wasn’t entirely convinced that was the smartest way to go and noted that making sure the other cast members returned was key as they were part of the previous iteration’s success.
“It was a straight-up ‘Hey, forget what you just saw, this is what we’re doing’ that was tough for me to swallow and we felt emotional about not having the others back,” D’Onofrio said.
The rest of the cast sees the return of Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle (a “Punisher Special Presentation“ is already in the works) alongside Deborah Ann Woll, Elden Henson, Ayelet Zurer, Wilson Bethel, Michael Gandolfini, Margarita Levieva, and Jeremy Earl.
Woll, Henson, Zurer, and Bethel being those Netflix actors that were brought back into the fold.
We’ll keep our fingers crossed with Fisk firmly established within the greater MCU (after appearances in “Hawkeye” and “Echo”), Marvel decides to start using The Kingpin in future “Spider-Man” movies. While he’s very much a Daredevil big-bad he’s long been disconnected in the live-action medium as one of Peter Parker’s more infamous villains and has connections with a wave of other Spidey threats.
Speaking of crossovers and MCU canon, it was previously confirmed that “Daredevil: Born Again” is set before the events of “She-Hulk,” which should give fans some idea of where these episodes fall within the great Marvel timeline and that Murdock hasn’t met Jennifer Walters (played by Tatiana Maslany).
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“Daredevil: Born Again” is already moving ahead with a second season (or fifth from the cast’s perspective) which sounds like Marvel wasn’t keen on waiting for an audience and critical response (despite buzzy reactions from last week) to keep things chugging along.
You can watch that full roundtable chat with IGN and cast members below.