ELEKTRA.

A SPIN-OFF BUILT FROM A CHARACTER WHO DIED

WHY FOX SPUN OFF A CORPSE INSTEAD OF MAKING DAREDEVIL 2

Fox and Marvel had reason to keep going after Daredevil’s $179.2 million worldwide gross against a $78 million budget, a result that cleared its costs even with mixed reviews. What they didn’t do was make a straight sequel. Ben Affleck said around the same time that he would return as Matt Murdock only for a follow-up that pushed toward a darker tone, an ask that would have taken real negotiation with the studio. Fox went a different way, handing the next film entirely to Jennifer Garner’s Elektra instead.

That choice came with a built-in problem: Elektra was dead. Bullseye kills her on screen near the end of Daredevil, so the spin-off has to resurrect her before it can tell its own story, using a blind mentor named Stick and a mystical order called the Kimagure who can raise the dead. Terence Stamp took the role of Stick, and has since described talking himself into the part rather than treating it as an easy yes, saying he wasn’t sure he could make a reality out of a character who was blind yet somehow saw more than everyone around him.

Garner’s own path onto the film wasn’t really a choice at all. She was contractually bound to appear in a follow-up as part of her deal on Daredevil. According to her former boyfriend and Alias co-star Michael Vartan, she called him during the shoot to say the film was bad: “I heard it was awful. She called me and told me it was awful. She had to do it because of Daredevil. It was in her contract.”

A SHOOT BUILT AROUND TWO OTHER TV SHOWS

HOW ALIAS AND ER LEFT NO ROOM TO PREPARE

Rob Bowman took the job coming off years of television work on The X-Files and the 2002 fantasy film Reign of Fire, and the production he inherited was built entirely around his stars’ other jobs rather than his own preparation time. Filming ran a compressed 62 days in Vancouver starting in May 2004, timed to begin the moment Garner went on hiatus from Alias and to wrap before she was due back on set. “The process of making this film was very, very compressed,” Bowman has said. “We had to start shooting when Jennifer finished Alias and we had to let her go at the end of her hiatus.”

Goran Visnjic, cast opposite Garner as single father Mark Miller, was fitted into the same kind of narrow window from the other side, stepping away from his role as Dr. Luka Kovač on ER to make the film before returning to that set. Bowman later put his own frustration plainly, comparing his resources to films with real prep time: “We didn’t have the time to make Spider-Man. We didn’t have the time to make Daredevil!”

“I didn’t feel that I could make a reality out of the linear version of Stick, who is blind… what is it they see in me that I’m unaware of?”

Terence Stamp, on being cast as Stick

TWELVE FRAMES FROM AN R RATING

THE CUTS THAT TURNED AN R-RATED FILM INTO A PG-13 ONE

Bowman shot Elektra as a harder film than the one that reached theatres. Facing MPAA objections concentrated on the film’s death scenes, he trimmed roughly three minutes to bring it down from an R rating to PG-13, a margin he has described in oddly precise terms: “Elektra, the theatrical release, was literally 12 frames of film from an R-rating. Twelve frames.” A brief dream-sequence cameo from Ben Affleck as Matt Murdock, filmed for the movie, was also cut before release.

Fox released an unrated director’s cut on DVD later in 2005, running about 100 minutes against the theatrical version’s 97, restoring the trimmed violence along with other material Bowman felt clarified the film’s supernatural rules. As with Daredevil’s own director’s cut two years earlier, the harder version built its own separate reputation among the people who sought it out, entirely apart from the cut that critics actually reviewed on release.

SELLING A MYSTIC WARRIOR, NOT A SEQUEL

WHY THE CAMPAIGN NEVER MENTIONED DAREDEVIL

The marketing sold Elektra as something closer to a mystical, martial-arts-inflected adventure than as a follow-up to a gritty vigilante film. Garner appeared in the character’s red costume rather than the black leather she’d worn in Daredevil, and the campaign rarely mentioned that earlier film by name at all.

Critics weren’t fooled by the repositioning. Rotten Tomatoes’ collected consensus on the film reads: “Jennifer Garner inhabits her role with earnest gusto, but Elektra’s tone deaf script is too self-serious and bereft of intelligent dialogue to provide engaging thrills,” a fair summary of a film asking audiences to take its own mysticism more seriously than its production ever earned.

The villains took a similar hit. Kirigi (Will Yun Lee), the assassin sent to hunt Elektra, gets little screen time before a rushed reveal tied to her mother’s death, and a supporting killer named Tattoo, whose ink comes alive to fight for him, was singled out for leaning on the gimmick more than any real menace. Retrospective critics still reach for the same image to explain why the film’s mysticism landed as unintentionally comic rather than eerie: a climactic fight staged around white sheets on a clothesline, meant to evoke Elektra’s dead mother, that reads on screen as little more than laundry.

THE REWATCH

A FIFTH-PLACE OPENING, AN 11% SCORE, AND THE END OF THE SPIN-OFF PLAN

Elektra opened on 14 January 2005 to $12.8 million from 3,204 theatres, finishing fifth for the weekend and posting the weakest opening of any Marvel adaptation released during that stretch of the mid-2000s, behind both Blade: Trinity’s $16.1 million and The Punisher’s $13.8 million. It closed domestically at $24.4 million and finished with $57.0 million worldwide against a $43 million budget, roughly a third of Daredevil’s own worldwide total.

Reviews were among the worst any Marvel-derived film had drawn to that point: Rotten Tomatoes lists an 11% critics’ score from 164 reviews against a 29% audience score, and Metacritic’s aggregate sits at 34. Marvel’s own leadership didn’t defend it. Speaking to investors two months after release, chief executive Avi Arad was blunt about what had gone wrong.

“Elektra was a mistake. Thankfully, it wasn’t a costly mistake, even for our partners. It was a project that was rushed. It was ill conceived, ill executed, and therefore, it didn’t work.”

Avi Arad, then-CEO of Marvel Studios, to investors, March 2005

No further Daredevil-universe spin-offs followed, and the film’s reputation as a cautionary tale outlived its theatrical run by years. In a leaked August 2014 email to Sony’s Michael Lynton, made public in the Sony Pictures hack, Marvel chief executive Ike Perlmutter listed Elektra alongside Catwoman and 1984’s Supergirl as evidence against greenlighting female-led superhero films, calling it a “very bad idea” whose “end result was very, very bad.”

Garner herself has stayed candid about the experience since, saying in 2021 that Marvel’s work only improved once Kevin Feige took over the studio: “It’s such a shame, honestly, because once Kevin took over everything there was elevated: the writing, the direction, the comedy inside of the stories they were telling. And I did not have that experience.” Garner got a lighter kind of redemption in 2024, reprising Elektra for a cameo in Deadpool & Wolverine, nearly twenty years after this film ended her run with the character the first time. For a first watch, Elektra sits in the Marvel movies in release order guide directly after The Punisher, closing out the run of Fox-era spin-offs that began with Blade.