Of all of the TV projects that Marvel Studios has in the works right now, few are as highly anticipated or under as much constant scrutiny as Daredevil: Born Again.
Marvel has been setting up its long-awaited Daredevil continuation for several years now — namely, via appearances from Wilson Fisk (Vincent D'Onofrio) and Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) in Spider-Man: No Way Home, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Hawkeye, and Echo. Unfortunately, the lukewarm reactions to some of those titles, as well as the numerous delays and behind-the-scenes changes that have plagued Born Again, have raised fans' concerns over whether or not Marvel will be able to successfully recapture the magic of Daredevil.
Marvel put some of those fears to rest or, at the very least, tamped them down a bit at this year's D23 Fan Event. The studio showed this year’s D23 attendees a brand new trailer for Daredevil: Born Again — one that teased the returns of longtime Marvel Cinematic Universe fan-favorites like Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll), Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson), and Frank Castle, a.k.a. The Punisher (Jon Bernthal). The trailer also offered viewers a glimpse at a version of Daredevil that feels bigger than the last and — even more importantly — deeply indebted to one of the greatest crime films of all time.
Marvel hasn't yet publicly released the Daredevil: Born Again trailer that premiered at D23. In the footage that was shown, though, viewers were given a taste of Born Again's story, which revolves around Wilson Fisk's mayoral campaign, as well as the debuts and returns of certain, disparate street-level vigilantes like Daredevil, Punisher, White Tiger (Kamar de los Reyes), Bullseye (Wilson Bethel), and a murderous graffiti artist named Muse. The trailer's climax, meanwhile, comes in the form of a diner conversation between Murdock and Fisk in which the two seemingly come to an arrangement of some kind, only for Matt to subsequently warn his nemesis not to cross a certain line. If he does, Matt promises him that he will be there to stop him again.
Feeling the Heat
It's a frank conversation between two idealistically opposed foes that immediately calls to mind the iconic coffee shop meeting between Al Pacino's police detective and Robert De Niro's bank robber in Michael Mann's 1995 masterpiece, Heat. Across its 170 minutes, that film maps the philosophical and mental conflict between Pacino's Vincent and Robert De Niro's Neil onto the city of Los Angeles itself — elevating their specific battle from a simple duel between a lawman and an outlaw into an operatic story of masculinity, solitude, and the costs of both the paths we choose to take and those we don't.
Heat is, in other words, a perfect reference point for a series like Daredevil: Born Again. Not only is it an epic told on a similar scale, but it also shows how a crime thriller can deliver a series of increasingly tense and explosive action set pieces without losing hold of the conflict at the center of its story. There is an elegance to Heat that isn't often found in the MCU, or in the superhero genre at large. (That said, the film was famously a major influence on Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.) There's no way of knowing right now whether or not Daredevil: Born Again will be able to replicate Heat’s narrative grace, either, but Fisk and Murdock's daytime meeting in its D23 trailer does suggest that the series has the right ideas about how to properly tell its story.
Wilson Fisk's mayoral campaign doesn't just threaten to give one of the MCU's most tenacious villains even more power and, therefore, raise the dramatic stakes of Daredevil: Born Again. It also gives the Disney+ series the chance to actually envelope the entirety of New York City in his and Matt Murdock's ongoing battle. Heat does that with Los Angeles by both setting different heists across the city’s landscape and wrapping up multiple, disparate characters in its central conflict.
By bringing Bullseye, Muse, White Tiger, and Punisher into the fray, all of whom practice vigilantism in vastly different ways, it looks like Daredevil: Born Again is trying to do the same thing. Indeed, despite all of the many issues it has faced over the last year, it really seems like the Disney+ series is striving to be a proper, sprawling crime epic the likes of which the MCU has never attempted before. If Born Again really does end up borrowing as many lessons from Heat as its first trailer suggests, then it has a good shot of being exactly that, too.
