At this point, it feels like there is almost nobody left in Hollywood who isn’t part of a major superhero franchise. When you add in those who have been part of previous franchises, the list of actors who have never played masked vigilantes gets even smaller. This is why even a movie like The Accountant 2 looks like a superhero crossover, as it co-stars both The Punisher and Daredevil.
Jon Bernthal is the official MCU Punisher (again) thanks to his appearance in the nearly completed first season of Daredevil: Born Again, but his next movie will be opposite the previous big screen Daredevil, i.e. Ben Affleck, when the two appear in the upcoming movie The Accountant 2. Our old Reelblend host Jake Hamilton recently asked the pair about The Punisher and Daredevil, and Affleck talked about the difference between the two eras of Marvel and what may be the biggest achievement of the MCU, a “clarity of tone.” Affleck said…
Well, his Punisher is good. Daredevil was an interesting story. It was before Kevin Feige had stepped into the role of running Marvel. He imposed a kind of clarity of tone across those movies that sort of figured out the trickiest thing, which is, 'How do you balance a movie where you got people wearing pajamas and have superpowers, and how seriously you take it, and how much humor is in it, and how much you wink at the audience, and what does the action have to look like?' It coincided with visual effects getting to a place where it could look really convincing. It made the way for great actors like him to step in and really get it done.' There's a new Daredevil, I haven't seen it yet, but I certainly love the character, I wish him the best, but I wouldn't tangle with his Punisher.
As Ben Affleck points out, the thing that really separated superhero movies before the MCU and after wasn’t the continuity of storyline, but the continuity of tone. Because every superhero movie was made in a vacuum, the characters, visuals and everything else often didn’t feel like they belonged in the same universe.
The idea of putting Ben Affleck’s Daredevil together with, say, Thomas Jane’s or Ray Stevenson's Punisher, would never have worked even if licensing rights had allowed for such a thing. That's because the world’s the characters inhabit, and the tone of their stories, were so wildly different that they wouldn’t have felt like they belonged together.
Of course, that consistency of tone has its downsides too. A lot of the MCU movies feel too similar to each other, with many critics and fans maybe not as excited about each installment as they once were, perhaps in part because the movies don’t feel different enough.
Even the MCU isn’t perfect in that regard. There’s a reason that Deadpool and Daredevil haven’t teamed up with the Avengers yet, and based on the current cast of Avengers: Doomsday, it won’t be happening for the foreseeable future. Even within the franchise, some characters don’t feel like they fit together quite perfectly.
It's really too bad that Ben Affleck never found success in the superhero world, because the guy clearly understands it all in a way that not everybody does, and he certainly wanted to make it work. Perhaps there's still a chance that he can find the right character and the right creative team to make it all work. For now, Affleck himself seems largely done with superhero movies, and I'm not sure anybody can blame him.
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