Years before Daredevil was the lead character in an acclaimed Netflix show meant for mature audiences, the character headlined a movie that starred future Batman Ben Affleck. The movie, which also featured Jennifer Garner, Michael Clarke Duncan, and The Batman‘s Colin Farrell, gave Daredevil’s backstory, and made enough money to earn an Elektra spinoff for Garner. Still, the movie was panned critically, Elektra flopped, and any ideas director Mark Steven Johnson had about a Daredevil franchise disappeared.
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In the time since then, a couple of things have happened. Johnson’s director’s cut of Daredevil got a commercial release on disc and digital, and has been widely regarded as a significantly better movie. And, of course, the Marvel Universe has blown up, first with the X-Men and Spider-Man franchises, and later with the MCU. But when Daredevil was in development, there were only a couple of precedents Johnson was able to look back on for inspiration.
“Yeah, X-Men was the first one where people went, ‘Wow, you can take these movies seriously and do something interesting,’” Johnson told Yahoo! Entertainment. “That was the one that changed everything, it really was. For Daredevil, I was using inspiration from The Crow and Blade, and movies like that which I loved so much.”
Fox was trying to develop a Daredevil follow up right up until 2013, when the clock ran out. Fox had the rights to Daredevil after making Johnson’s film, but those lapsed back to Disney before Fox ever fully committed to a planned sequel or reboot. Johnson now kind of marvels at the fact that it wasn’t that long ago that people just couldn’t see it.
“It was such a different world then,” Johnson said of the time before the MCU. “It’s funny, we were developing Daredevil before the first Spider-Man came out and I remember people saying to me, ‘I don’t think that movie’s gonna work.’ I was like, ‘Why? Spider-Man is one of the greatest characters.’ And they said, ‘Well, you can’t see his face!’ I remember telling people I was going to do Daredevil and they would say to me, ‘You mean Evel Knievel?’ I’d explain, ‘No, he’s a blind lawyer who has superpowers and heightened senses and he puts on a devil costume to fight crime.’ And they’d be like, ‘Oh, so it’s a comedy?’ Nobody knew who the character was then! The Marvel catalogue was so deep. And now everybody knows all the characters. It’s pretty amazing how much has changed in 20 years.”
