DAREDEVIL
SEASON 1

FROM LAPSED FOX RIGHTS TO A STREAMING ORDER

HOW DAREDEVIL CAME BACK TO MARVEL AND WENT TO NETFLIX

The 2003 film Daredevil was made under a Fox licence, and the character stayed there afterwards. Fox had until 10 October 2012 to get a reboot into production and missed that date, and by April 2013 Kevin Feige had confirmed that the rights had returned to Marvel and Disney. Before letting the rights lapse, Fox had cycled through several screenwriters and hired David Slade to direct, and he stayed attached for over a year before leaving.

The character came back through television instead of cinemas. On 7 November 2013 Disney announced a deal with Netflix for series based on Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist and Luke Cage, building to a miniseries called The Defenders. The deal covered four 13-episode series and a four-episode miniseries, 56 episodes in all, with the shows set in Hell’s Kitchen and due to start rolling out in 2015. In the Marvel Marathon catalogue Daredevil is the first of them to arrive, ahead of Jessica Jones Season 1 in November 2015.

A MOVIE PITCH BECOMES A SERIES

DREW GODDARD’S PITCH, AND THE SHOWRUNNER WHO TOOK OVER

Drew Goddard did not begin with a series. In September 2015, he said he had pitched Daredevil to Marvel as a film some years after Ben Affleck’s. He said a Daredevil movie did not want to cost $200 million, and that on the small screen the team would have more freedom to make it more adult.

“[H]e’s not saving the world. He’s just keeping his corner clean.”

Drew Goddard on Matt Murdock, September 2015

Goddard did not stay in charge. By 24 May 2014 he had stepped down as showrunner to concentrate on writing and directing The Sinister Six for Sony, while remaining with the series as a consultant. Steven S. DeKnight, who had run Spartacus on Starz for three seasons and had worked on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Lost, took over. The 13-episode season was due to begin principal photography in summer 2014. Goddard was still credited as the series’ creator when the renewal was announced.

THE LEADS, THEIR PREPARATION AND THE SUPPORTING CAST

CHARLIE COX, VINCENT D’ONOFRIO AND PLAYING A BLIND, CATHOLIC LAWYER

Charlie Cox played Matt Murdock and Vincent D’Onofrio played Wilson Fisk. Deborah Ann Woll played the secretary Karen Page, Elden Henson played Matt’s law partner Foggy Nelson and Rosario Dawson played the nurse Claire Temple. Toby Leonard Moore played James Wesley, and Peter McRobbie recurred as the priest Father Paul Lantom.

Cox prepared for the blindness with outside help. Joe Strechay taught him cane technique and had him practise walking city streets blindfolded. Cox has said Strechay works very closely with the American Foundation for the Blind.

Matt’s religion mattered to the series as well. Cox was raised Catholic and found it useful for the church scenes. In his words, “I was raised a Catholic. It definitely helped.” He added that he did not have to pretend any of it.

A DARKER CORNER OF THE UNIVERSE

HELL’S KITCHEN AFTER THE BATTLE OF NEW YORK, A DARKER TONE AND THE HALLWAY FIGHT

The series is set in the aftermath of The Avengers, with Fisk and his associates looking to profit from the reconstruction of the city. That is the series’ link to the films: the Battle of New York is its backdrop.

The tone was a deliberate choice. DeKnight said that Frank Miller’s run on the comic really spoke to the writers, and that Marvel was willing to explore a darker corner of its universe, which he called a risk given that it had a formula that works. He also said Marvel flagged a scene in episode 4 involving a baseball bat, and that when he looked again he agreed it had gone a little too far.

The season’s most discussed scene is the hallway fight that ends episode 2, “Cut Man,” directed by Phil Abraham. Goddard’s vision was a continuous five-minute fight, and Abraham insisted on shooting it as one shot. Stunt coordinator Philip Silvera’s team had two days to rehearse, and on the shoot day Abraham and cinematographer Matthew J. Lloyd spent half their time planning camera angles. Stunt double Chris Brewster and Cox swapped places when the camera passed into shadows. Silvera said the sequence ran five and a half minutes with more than 105 fight beats, and that the usable take came around the tenth or twelfth attempt.

THE REWATCH

A BINGE RELEASE, A QUICK RENEWAL AND A SEASON THAT CRITICS LOVED

Netflix released all 13 episodes on 10 April 2015, with runtimes from 49 minutes (“Condemned”) to 60 minutes (“The Ones We Leave Behind”). Third-party estimates from Luth Research suggested that roughly 10% of Netflix’s 40.9 million domestic subscribers watched it over its first 11 days, about 4.4 million people, and 2.3% of subscribers, about 940,000, did so on the first day. Luth did not yet track viewing on television sets, so the estimates leave that viewing out.

Netflix renewed the series for a second season in April 2015 and named Doug Petrie and Marco Ramirez as the new showrunners in place of DeKnight. Season 2 was released on 18 March 2016. The series ran for three seasons, and the character later returned in the revival Daredevil: Born Again, which began on 4 March 2025.

Rotten Tomatoes lists a 99% critics’ score from 72 reviews and a 93% audience score, and its consensus credits the show’s dedication to the source material and its high production standards. Metacritic gives it a 75 from 22 critics. In the Marvel Marathon it sits in the Marvel TV shows in order guide between Agent Carter Season 1 and WHIH Newsfront Season 1, and in the MCU timeline guide between Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Jessica Jones Season 1.