Last year, when Daredevil was on its way to becoming one of Netflix’s best shows, creator Drew Goddard abandoned the series to jump on board Sony’s feature take on the villainous Sinister Six spinoff. That movie has yet to move forward beyond his script, and there were rumors swirling around the Internet that Goddard and Marvel were on different pages, and not everyone was happy. But Goddard has not only dismissed those rumors as false, he also confirmed that he’ll be involved with Daredevil once again for Season 2.
Here’s how The Martian screenwriter described his relationship with the entertainment giant to Collider, and where he’s at with Daredevil.
I love Marvel, I still work with them. I was in the writers room of Season 2 a couple weeks ago – it’s going. I think this sort of got portrayed as this sort of animosity, [but] it’s never been the case. They know I love their properties, they’ve been very nice to me; we just keep trying to find the right fit.
To me, it seemed like the “right fit” for Marvel, at least at that point, was keeping Goddard on Daredevil as its showrunner. His scripts for the first two episodes were adapted beautifully by Phil Abraham, and one has to wonder how Goddard would have changed them up had he been involved as a director as well. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely adored everything that the replacement showrunner, Spartacus mastermind Steven S. DeKnight, put forth, and I can’t help but think that he’s a major reason why Daredevil’s fight scenes were so memorably amazing. In that respect, maybe it was better that Goddard had to step away.
Season 2 will say goodbye to DeKnight, as he’s moving on to other projects, and the show will now have showrunners in Season 1 writers Doug Petrie and Marco Ramirez. Goddard says that his relationship with the duo is still strong, and that he still provides consulting to them when necessary.
My job is wonderful, which is – I mean, my friends are running it, Marco and Doug, and when I say, ‘What do you guys need?’ they say, ‘Come in, talk.’ That’s how it works. I’m still the executive producer. I show up and we talk about Matt Murdock and I say, ‘Do you need any more help?’ and they say, ‘No,’ and then I leave.
Goddard is the kind of creative mind who puts a lot of thought into the things he’s writing – which is one of the reasons why Cabin in the Woods was such an amazing movie – so even if he isn’t completely enveloped in all things Daredevil for Season 2, at least his fandom-fronted mind is being utilized when necessary. So long as rumors of animosity between him and Marvel remain untrue, we can probably look forward to seeing him tinkering with parts of that universe for years.
Daredevil Season 2, which will feature the highly anticipated live-action TV debut of The Punisher, will premiere on Netflix at some point in 2016.
