Daredevil showrunner Stephen DeKnight responded to some fan commentary this weekend, explaining the budget is the main reason Daredevil: Born Again this looks different from the Netflix version. On Friday, a fan account posted a supercut of action scenes from the Disney+ shows where we’ve seen Daredevil fight, noting that he looks “more agile and acrobatic,” and is “moving more like comic Daredevil since he got into the MCU.” DeKnight explained that this was something the team always wanted to improve on the Netflix show, but only in the Disney+ era were they given the budget they needed. It’s unclear if this refers to CGI, choreography, or a combination of the two.
Videos by ComicBook.com
“It’s purely a financial issue,” he wrote. “On the Netflix show, we didn’t have the money to do this. If we had, we would have.” DeKnight can speak authoritatively here, as he was the original showrunner for Daredevil in 2015 as well. It was his second job as showrunner following his Starz series Spartacus, which he created as well. He certainly has experience with dynamic action, and commenters assured him they were not disappointed with Daredevil back in 2015.
DeKnight only handled the first season of Daredevil, after which he moved on to a writers room for the Transformers franchise, then to write and direct Pacific Rim Uprising. He has not returned to the MCU since then, and is not working on Born Again. That series comes from showrunner Dario Scardapane, though as with all Marvel productions, there is a huge team behind it.
[RELATED: Daredevil: Born Again Finally Feels Like Television (And That’s Good News for Marvel)]
There are a lot of reasonable explanations for the different visual styles between these two shows, but as DeKnight said, they all come back to budget and time constraints. The biggest difference between the Netflix Defenderverse shows and the Disney+ MCU shows is the episode count — back then, they got generally 13 episodes per season, while now they are lucky to get eight or 10 episodes. Several shows have had only six.
Born Again was originally planned to have one massive 18-episode season, harkening back to the days of network TV. However, the order was eventually split for two seasons with nine episodes each. The second season is already filming now, which means a shorter wait between releases.
In the meantime, there are still three more episodes of Daredevil: Born Again to air over the next two weeks. New episodes drop on Tuesday nights at 9 p.m. ET on Disney+. The Netflix-era Daredevil series is streaming there now as well.
