Marvel Is “Very Much Exploring” A Defenders Reboot
The MCU is about to get a little bit bigger.
It took years for Marvel Studios to revive Daredevil, the flagship series in Netflix’s “Defenders” universe. But even before a reboot was in the works, Marvel executives knew they couldn’t abandon the cast. Charlie Cox, who played the eponymous anti-hero in Daredevil, is the definitive version of the character, at least in live-action. The same goes for Vincent D’Onofrio, who portrayed his arch-nemesis, Wilson Fisk. After Daredevil’s cancellation in 2018, the Marvel team wasn’t sure about folding the series into the MCU proper. But as executive producer Sana Amanat recently told Entertainment Weekly, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige had one condition for a Daredevil revival: “We just have to make sure it’s Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio.”
Cox and D’Onofrio were the first to make the jump from the Defenders-verse and into the MCU. After cameos in Spider-Man: No Way Home and more substantial roles in Marvel shows like She-Hulk and Echo, the adversaries will take center stage in Daredevil: Born Again. The new show might not have started off as a sequel to the Netflix original, but as Daredevil and Kingpin’s presence in the MCU grew, a straightforward revival felt “inevitable” — at least for Marvel’s head of TV, Brad Winderbaum.
“It was never a question in my mind that we would be bringing them back, and that it needed to be Charlie and Vincent,” Winderbaum told EW.
Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio are setting the tone for a Defenders reboot.
That set a strong precedent when it came to other members of the cast. Born Again initially featured only a few returning actors, but after a major creative overhaul, Marvel brought back the bulk of the Daredevil cast. And as the series gears up for its March release, fans wonder if the studio will follow suit with other actors from the Defenders universe. Cox’s Daredevil has already teamed up with characters like Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter), the bulletproof Luke Cage (Mike Colter), and martial arts master Danny Rand, aka Iron Fist (Finn Jones). A future season of Born Again could get the one-time team back together, but Marvel could also reboot their respective Netflix shows, just as it did with Daredevil. It’s still early days, but Winderbaum is keen to make something work.
“I can’t say much, but I’ll tell you that it’s so exciting to be able to play in that sandbox,” Winderbaum told EW. “Obviously, we don’t have the unlimited storytelling resources like a comic book, [where] if you can draw it, you can do it. We’re dealing with actors and time and the massive scale of production in order to build a cinematic universe, especially on television.”
That said, if the stars eventually align, “it is certainly something that is creatively extremely exciting and that we are very much exploring,” Winderbaum said.
Per Amanant, Elektra Natchios could “eventually” rise again in the MCU.
Other characters from Daredevil’s world could also find their way into the MCU eventually. Though she seemed to meet her end in the season finale of The Defenders, fans are not-so-quietly hoping that Elodie Yung’s Elektra could somehow rise again. Some are also wondering what’s happened to the Hand, the secret society of ninjas that served as antagonists throughout the Defenders universe. Amanat is very aware of that curiosity on every level; it seems she’s looking for ways to bring Elektra and the Hand to the MCU.
“One-hundred percent it’s in the back of our heads,” Amanat said of Elektra. “Eventually we’ll try to figure out a bit more with that.”
For the first time in years, the possibilities truly seem endless for this particular part of the MCU. It may be a while before we’ll see Marvel’s new plan in motion — but at least we know that something could be in the works for the street-level corner of the franchise.
