Daredevil: Born Again was originally intended as more of a reboot than a revival, according to the series’ editors. It’s no secret that Born Again underwent a massive creative overhaul during the production process, cutting its 18-episode order from one large season into two, and splicing a few planned storylines together. Last week, editors Cedric Nairn-Smith, Stephanie Filo, and Melissa Lawson shared more details in an interview with Awards Radar. They revealed that when work on the series first began, the cast and crew were told to disregard the Netflix original series Daredevil altogether.
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“The original take on it was to lean away from the Netflix Daredevil show,” Filo said. “They actually told us not to watch the Netflix show, because they didn’t want to affect how we were editing it. Once we restructured everything and figured out we would do a different take on it, we dove back into the Netflix side of things. We were able to use temp music from that Netflix series, and get back to that darker vibe.”
The changes in Daredevil: Born Again are all thanks to the 2023 Hollywood labor strikes, which halted production and provided time for Marvel to reconsider its approach. By then, six episodes had already been filmed, and Marvel Studios reviewed them and determined that this was the wrong direction to take Matt Murdock’s story. At the time, insiders told The Hollywood Reporter that the plan was to make the series closer in tone to the Netflix series. While plotting out this new course, they also decided to be more faithful to the older series as well, thanks in part to input from Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio.
The result has been criticized in its own ways as well — some reviews and fan commentary have argued that the footage from those initial six episodes should have been scrapped, as it stands out from the rest of the series. Characters like the serial killer Muse (Hunter Doohan) felt out of place to some, while the absence of familiar faces like Karen (Deborah Ann Woll) and Foggy (Elden Henson) felt wrong. Still, the editors were proud of how they tied it all together by making Matt and Fisk’s arcs into parallels of each other.
“Sometimes, we would iterate these episodes, and would be asked at times to intercut these scenes,” said Nairn-Smith. “We thought intercuts would not work because they weren’t intended to be intercut. However, once we started intercutting, we found out that there were common threads here. It felt like it was a happy accident that these inner cuts worked, and that you would find these connections. A lot of it was trial and error trying to find those threads, but some of it was also planned.”
Cheung gave an example, describing a scene where “we’re seeing Matt with bloody knuckles, and we know that Fisk will also have them. We tied those two together because they were still shooting and were able to grab a close-up of that. We could then tie these shots together, which had a bigger impact. That happened in other places as well. Instead of having transitions that would flow nicely into some establishing shots, you would have Fisk and Matt cut together so that you would have them and their story be part of the transition instead, which was emotionally more impactful.”
Daredevil: Born Again Season 1 is streaming now on Disney+. Season 2 is filming now, and is expected to premiere in March of 2026.
