Netflix’s Daredevil was a huge hit with Marvel fans and, in a perfect world where licensing rights weren’t an issue, it may still be on television today. Unfortunately, Disney+’s launch and the dissolution of Marvel TV led to the collapse of the series and Netflix’s shared universe. And due to agreements between the streamer and Disney, the character couldn’t appear in Marvel projects for a number of years following its cancellation. However, recent MCU cameos from Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio's characters proved that’s no longer the case and, now that they’re back as Daredevil and Kingpin, respectively, a petition to revive the series has gained serious momentum.
Days after Netflix officially canceled Daredevil back in 2018, Joseph Garcia started a petition on Change.org to save the Marvel series. It didn’t take long for the petition to gain momentum, as an update Garcia posted on December 3rd of that year boasted the page already amassed 10k signatures. By January 10th of 2019, another update said that support from Vincent D’Onofrio and others helped the petition reach over 150k signatures. Now with the recent cameos by the Daredevil actors in Hawkeye and Spider-Man: No Way Home, the petition sits at over 430k signatures at the time of this writing and is certainly on track to hit its 500k goal.
Granted, it may not seem like a huge jump for a petition that’s been going for three years, but there are some things to consider. For example, once details about Netflix’s hold on Daredevil characters surfaced, it soon became clear that hope for a revival in the immediate future wasn’t a possibility. But since fans have recently seen two of its leads back as their characters in the mainstream MCU, fans are now more optimistic we’ll see a Daredevil revival.
It certainly seems likely that Daredevil and other affiliated characters will have a larger presence in the franchise, but the odds of the Netflix series getting a full-on revival are still up in the air. Vincent D’Onofrio told CinemaBlend’s Erik Swann that the Kingpin that appeared on Hawkeye is essentially the same character, though there are some things from the previous series that were “impossible” to connect. This means there are parts of Daredevil that were either inconsistent with the Marvel Studios' continuity and can’t appear in the story, which could indicate these are variants of the characters from the Netflix series.
Creating variants would essentially allow the studio to pick and choose what it liked from the original show and leave out the parts that don’t jive with its own canon should a revival be in the works. Marvel hasn’t announced a Daredevil project yet, though we do know Hawkeye alum Echo (played by Alaqua Cox) will get her own spinoff.
Echo has ties to the Man Without Fear and as we saw in the Disney+ series, Kingpin as well. So it’s possible we’ll see some characters from the universe pop up there as well in what could eventually set up a proper revival. That’s what I’m hoping for anyway, and I know I’m not the only fan wanting that to happen.
As fans await news on Daredevil's future, but fans can still watch the original series right now with a Netflix subscription.
