Three years ago, Daredevil Season 3 hit Netflix and was met with widespread critical acclaim. Unfortunately, just a month later, Netflix cancelled Daredevil, the first of the platform’s Marvel series to be tossed aside. In the years to follow though, many fans have championed for Charlie Cox to reprise the role of Matt Murdock, and it’s even been rumored he’ll appear as the character in Spider-Man: No Way Home. As Cox sees it though, playing Daredevil again doesn’t guarantee everyone will be pleased with his return.
During his recent visit to Sirius XM’s The Jessica Shaw Show, Charlie Cox talked about how even if he were to suit back up as Daredevil, that doesn’t mean the same quality present in the Daredevil series’ three seasons on Netflix will be retained. As the actor explained:
You’ve got to be careful what you wish for. You come back and it’s not as good or it doesn’t quite work or it’s too much time has passed. It doesn’t quite come together in the same way. You don’t want to taint what you’ve already got. If we never come back, we’ve also got these three great seasons and our third season was our best reviewed. So the trajectory was up. I for one am tremendously proud and grateful for what we have.
He has a point. Even if Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock/Daredevil performance is just as exceptional now as it was when he was shooting the Netflix show, he would also be acting out material written by new people. That’s not to say that the scenes and dialogue would automatically be bad, but naturally fans of the series would compare how Cox’s Daredevil from the Netflix days measured this more recent version, whether he appeared in a movie or a Disney+ series. As things stand now, Cox is happy with how his original Daredevil tenure turned out.
During the interview, Charlie Cox also acknowledged that even if he were to play Daredevil again, it wouldn’t necessarily be the same version we watched in the latter half of the 2010s. Cox explained his reasoning thusly:
If there was an opportunity for me to come back as Daredevil, whatever that would look like, I imagine it would be a reimagining of the character and the show. If they choose me to do it, there’s going to be some elements that are of course the same. Or they might choose someone else and reboot it all over again.
While the Marvel shows on Netflix did occasionally call back to events in the MCU movies, the connective threads between these two corners of the Marvel media empire were loose at best. Plus, the shows were made by the now-defunct Marvel Television rather than Marvel Studios, which is handling Disney+’s live-action MCU shows, as well as the animated What If… ?. As such, even though it’d be Charlie Cox in the Daredevil role again, he’d have a different history so that the MCU wouldn’t need to acknowledge what unfolded during those three seasons. But like Cox said, we also can’t discount the possibility that Daredevil will simply be rebooted for the official MCU continuity so as to start with a truly clean slate.
In any case, it won’t be too much longer until we learn whether or not Charlie Cox is indeed reprising Matt Murdock in Spider-Man: No Way Home, as the threequel spins its web in theaters on December 17. Beyond that, we’ll keep you apprised of any major updates concerning Daredevil’s on-screen future and other news concerning upcoming Marvel movies.
