Before Charlie Cox, There Were Surprising Plans for a Daredevil Reboot

Daredevil: Born Again isn’t just the big TV return of Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock/Daredevil, when the series premieres on March 4th on Disney+ it will also mark the tenth anniversary of the original Netflix Daredevil series. After the last decade of Cox reprising this superhero role in projects like Spider-Man: No Way Home, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, and Echo, he’s absolutely become Daredevil for audiences everywhere. It’s hard to imagine anyone else playing the Man Without Fear in modern pop culture, even though the MCU version of Daredevil almost never happened and instead plans for a new feature film almost came together very quickly.

Not so long ago, 20th Century Fox had the film rights to the vigilante/lawyer Daredevil right alongside the X-Men and Fantastic Four. After 2002’s Daredevil starring Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner, Fox would eventually lose the film rights to Daredevil, thus paving the road for the likes of Born Again. However, for one brief moment, it looked like Fox would cobble together a reboot that ensured Hornhead stayed over at the studio that produced endless Wolverine and Deadpool movies.

Why Did Fox Almost Purse a Daredevil Reboot?

From the mid-90s to the mid-2000s, major movie studios didn’t blink much at the prospect of losing the film rights to obscure Marvel Comics superheroes. Spider-Man and X-Men movies were a license to print money, but titles like Hulk and The Punisher had proved they weren’t bulletproof. 2002’s Daredevil fell into the latter camp. Though it squeaked past $100 million domestically, it hadn’t proven profitable nor beloved enough to spawn sequels (though a Jennifer Garner-starring Elektra spinoff did happen). These kinds of titles meant few Sony executives shed tears over losing out on making a Thor film while studios like New Line Cinema gladly handed back Iron Man to Marvel Studios in late 2005.

Once Marvel Studios’ Iron Man became a juggernaut in May 2008, though, a new threat emerged in the pop culture landscape. Companies that didn’t make use of film rights (which typically expire at some point in time) would now lose them to the mighty Marvel Studios if they didn’t move fast. By early 2010 Fox was actively developing a new Daredevil movie with David Scarpa (Gladiator II) penning a script. The following year, 30 Days of Night and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse director David Slade signed on to helm the project.

There was a massive ticking clock on this production since Fox had to get Daredevil rolling by October 10, 2012 or else Marvel would get the character’s rights back. At the time, the studio was in the middle of wrapping up X-Men: First Class, a motion picture made to keep the X-Men film rights that started shooting just under nine months before its June 2011 release. In other words, Fox had experience getting superhero movies done quickly to meet contractual demands. The ideal hope was that Daredevil could be the next First Class.

[RELATED: Daredevil: Born Again Has an Unusual Release Schedule (But Fans Will Love It)]

Why Didn’t The Daredevil Reboot Happen?

Slade’s vision for Daredevil would’ve been a period piece set in the 70s with an incredibly gritty tone, Wilson Fisk/Kingpin as the villain, and featuring comic-accurate flourishes like Daredevil beating up bad guys in his yellow suit. It was a bold take that Slade himself had admitted didn’t really fit into the concept Fox had for a crowdpleaser superhero movie. Slade eventually left the feature over creative differences, which was basically the death knell for this reboot. With just a few months to go until Fox lost the film rights, the studio didn’t have nearly enough pieces together to get a project together. At least that’s how it appeared

The last few weeks before Fox lost those rights birthed some surprises however. Director Joe Carnahan stepped in at the last minute to try and get the production done, with Carnahan also envisioning his reboot as a 1970s period piece There was also a (eventually debunked) rumor that Marvel Studios would let Fox keep the Daredevil film rights in exchange for the film rights to cosmic Marvel characters like Silver Surfer. All the chaos wasn’t enough to stave off the inevitable, with Marvel Studios securing Daredevil’s film rights by the end of the year.

Just a year later, in late 2013, Marvel Television announced plans to relaunch Matt Murdock/Daredevil as a prestige cable/streaming series as part of a larger Defenders enterprise. From there, Charlie Cox’s modern version of the character emerged and became an icon. In hindsight, the whole struggle with Fox and Daredevil’s film rights is like something from a different planet. With Disney now owning the company (now called 20th Century Studios), this legal skirmish over Hornhead is a relic of an older pre-Born Again era, and the kind of IP battle we’ll almost never see again.

Daredevil (2002) is now streaming on Disney+, Daredevil: Born Again begins streaming on Disney+ on March 4.