This is Marvel’s last chance to strike streaming gold

Blind superhero Matt Murdock is back in Daredevil: Born Again’. It follows a run of abject misfires for the sprawling franchise, says Louis Chilton but this could be different

- Louis Chilton

Titles rarely come more loaded than Daredevil: Born Again. Disney+’s latest series is a reboot and continuation of Daredevil, the well-regarded Marvel show that aired on Netflix between 2015 and 2018. Charlie Cox returns as the blind crime-fighting lawyer Matt Murdock, while Vincent D’Onofrio is Kingpin, a villainous mafioso with a bald head and the dimensions of a mid-range people carrier. Amid a churning sea of superhero content, Daredevil managed to find its footing; it was gritty, modest in its ambitions, and beloved by fans.

The title Born Again is both an homage to a beloved 1986 Daredevil comic arc and a nod to the fact that this is a revival series. But there’s another metatextual meaning here. The past four years have seen Marvel try and fail to replicate its cinematic dominance in the world of streaming; Daredevil: Born Again is the 15th Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) series to hit Disney+ since 2021. Marvel will be hoping that the series can itself be a rebirth – that the company’s misguided forays into the world of streaming can be transformed, phoenix-like, into something capable of flight. If Daredevil, a tried-and-true formula with a built-in fanbase, can’t do it, then I’m not sure anything will.

In the early era of the MCU – that is to say, between the theatrical release of The Incredible Hulk in 2007 and the launch of Disney’s proprietary streaming service in 2022 – the TV arm of the universe was an entirely different beast. It began on traditional broadcast television: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (20132020), the sci-fi series co-created by Avengers’ Joss Whedon, ran for seven seasons on ABC, while Agent Carter (2015-16), a period spy series focusing on Hayley Atwell’s