The first season of Daredevil: Born Again has wrapped up on Disney+, and it’s safe to say it was a big success, both with critics and fans. The show brings back the titular hero, played by Charlie Cox, and his classic adversary, Kingpin, portrayed by Vincent D'Onofrio in triumphant fashion after nearly seven years in the wilderness (save for a quick cameo in Spider-Man: No Way Home), after Disney acquired the original Daredevil series from Netflix.
It’s a much grittier show than one would expect from Disney, following in the tradition of its Netflix predecessor. It’s also much more violent than anyone would expect from a Disney+ original. While those two aspects of the show are definitely strengths, that’s not what I think the broader MCU could take away from the show’s success. The MCU doesn’t need to be more violent, it needs more movies to be self-contained, smaller stories. The ever-expanding universe (or universes) needs to be reigned in occasionally. Let me explain, please.
Marvel Reached A Pinnacle In 2019, But Lately, It’s Been Dicey
Avengers: Endgame was an incredible triumph for the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2019. It was the culmination of 22 movies, starting with Iron Man in 2008. If you watch the MCU movies in order, as I did during the early months of the COVID-19 lockdown with my Disney+ subscription, it reinforces just how well they built the universe up from one superhero to dozens. The 13 movies since (soon to be 14 with the upcoming release of Thunderbolts* in May) have been a mixed bag, at best.
While some of the movies have been okay, none have really reached the pre-Endgame level. The expansion of the universe into Disney+ shows like Loki and WandaVision was promising, though even there, the franchise has been uneven, with less-acclaimed shows like Moon Knight, which started strong but felt incomplete. What has worked about the shows is that they are, for the most part, self-contained stories.
The MCU Should Have Reset After Avengers: Endgame
The slow build over 11 years allowed fans of the MCU to digest everything one thing at a time. First, it was just Robert Downey, Jr. taking on a human villain, Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges), after building his first Iron Man suit. It’s a traditional comic book-like story, with one superhero and one villain, great action, and funny dialogue. In the first-ever post-credit scene, audiences meet Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), and the seeds are sewn for the future, and it’s big.
Over the course of the next few movies, we meet The Incredible Hulk, Thor, and Captain America (before the first Avengers movies dropped) and we got to see those core members of the collective (including Hawkeye and Black Widow) come together to fight Loki and The Other in The Avengers.
From there, the movies just kept getting bigger, and more and more heroes and villains were introduced. The Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, Black Panther, and more kept joining in on the fun, and for us, as fans, it was exhilarating every time a new movie was released. Finally, we came to Avengers: Endgame, and all of it came together. From Captain America finally delivering the line “Avengers, assemble,” to Tony Stark’s death, the movie was a perfect way to close the Infinity Saga.
That should have been a signal to the powers that be that it was time for a reset. It doesn’t help that COVID hit less than a year later, slowing everything in the world, and in Hollywood down to a crawl for a while. Yet another reason it felt like time to bring everything back to earth. Of course, that’s not what happened.
The MCU Is Too Big
When I say the MCU is too big, I mean the plots and the locations are way too expansive. We’re following heroes across the universe, indeed across an infinite number of universes. There are movies to follow, TV shows to keep up on, and all along the way, there are easter eggs and teases dropped that reward those who are dedicated enough to keep up with it all, but increasingly annoying more casual fans.
What the MCU has lost is its connection to the heroes. Marvel is renowned (for good reason) for the way it has grounded most of its superheroes over the years, and there is nothing grounded about the current state of the MCU. There are heroes and villains with the power of gods, who fight their battles in the deepest depths of space. This is a great end game (pun intended), but when you reach the end, you can’t keep going.
Daredevil: Born Again Is A Blueprint
Daredevil: Born Again is a grounded, heartfelt story, set in one neighborhood in New York City, about one hero (or two, if you count a few scenes with Punisher), dealing with his own personal issues while struggling to find purpose as a person and a superhero after the death of a friend. For me, these are the superhero stories I love. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Endgame, but I need things to build up to a Thanos-size supervillain, not start with one.
This is where I think the MCU should start again. Take one hero, and honestly, Spider-Man would have been perfect, and have him go up against one of his traditional villains on the streets of New York, just like a classic Spidey comic book. Slowly reintroduce old heroes and bring in new ones for a few movies, then try to recreate the triumph of Avengers: Endgame.
Now, I’m realistic, I understand there is a business component to all of this. The execs have to, for better or worse, feed the beast they’ve created. They have to keep trying to top themselves, but as we’ve seen over the last four or five years, it’s impossible to fake the magic that 11 years of storytelling gave us just by giving movies bigger budgets and more cameos. So start over, bring things back to a human scale for a while, and build the MCU back up, so we can all enjoy a moment like “Avengers, assemble!” again.
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