Spider-Man: No Way Home Almost Had a Ben Affleck Daredevil Easter Egg

Charlie Cox and Jon Favreau had some fun with their shared Daredevil connection.

By Russ Burlingame

Charlie Cox may be Marvel's Daredevil to a generation of TV fans, but nobody -- including Cox -- has forgotten the 2003 feature film starring Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner. The movie, which got a bit of a wink in Deadpool & Wolverine earlier this summer, was almost shouted out in a much more subtle way in Spider-Man: No Way Home. Speaking at the Tampa Bay Comic Con, Cox told fans that, since he shared a scene with Jon Favreau's Happy Hogan, it seemed only appropriate to acknowledge that Favreau had also once played Foggy Nelson to Ben Affleck's Daredevil.

Apparently, there was an improvised joke that they slipped into at least one of the takes. Unfortunately for Marvel fans really eager to play out that Leonardo DiCaprio meme at home, it ended up on the cutting room floor.

"In Spider-Man I got to do a scene with Jon Favreau who I love," Cox said (via PopVerse). "He also plays Foggy in that film [Daredevil 2003]. I'm not sure if it made it into the movie in the end, but we tried to get a pun in, like a little Easter egg, where I ask him a question and Jon's character Happy says, 'Yeah, I'm a little foggy on that right now.' I don't know if it made it into the movie, I can't remember, but we played with it on the day, hoping people would pick up on it."

Daredevil released in 2003 to underwhelming reviews and a tepid audience response. The movie made $179 million against a $78 million budget -- respectable enough numbers, but not what the studio was hoping for. They followed it up with Elektra, which spun out Jennifer Garner's antiheroine into her own story with a smaller budget (estimated variously between $43 and $65 million) rather than a direct sequel. Elektra was a box office bomb, and until Deadpool & Wolverine, no characters from that film were ever seen again.

Daredevil was the first of Netflix's handful of Marvel "Defenders" shows. Taking a street-level approach to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the series drew inevitable comparisons to the Marvel Knights line, which reinvented numerous Marvel Comics titles in the late '90s and early 2000s, and featured some of the same characters, including Daredevil. Eventually when Disney decided to make its own streaming service, they allowed their deal with Netflix to lapse and slowly cancelled each of the shows. Cox's Matt Murdoch went into limbo for a while, until he was brought back to serve as Peter Parker's lawyer in No Way Home.

Yesterday, Marvel revealed the first official look at Cox's Daredevil in the planned Disney+ series Daredevil: Born Again, which will reunite the cast of the Netflix series, but rather than being a Marvel Knights-style mature audiences show, this one should fit a little more seamlessly into the larger MCU.

In Daredevil: Born Again, Charlie Cox returns as Matt Murdock / Daredevil and he'll be joined by Vincent D'Onofrio (Wilson Fisk / Kingpin), Jon Bernthal (Frank Castle / Punisher), Wilson Bethel (Benjamin Poindexter / Bullseye), Deborah Ann Woll (Karen Page), Elden Henson (Foggy Nelson), Ayelet Zurer (Vanessa Fisk), Margarita Levieva, Michael Gandolfini, Genneya Walton, and Arty Froushan. 

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Daredevil: Born Again is expected to be released on Disney+ starting March 2025. 

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