[COLUMN] Marvel Was Once Embarrassed by Netflix and Fox; Now It's Nostalgic For Them | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Just over two weeks ago, it was announced that Deborah Ann Woll and Elden Henson would reprise their roles as Karen Page and Foggy Nelson on Daredevil: Born Again. Last week, the two were photographed on set with actor Charlie Cox, marking a reunion from the Netflix Daredevil show. In that same window, it was confirmed that Wilson Bethel would return as the supervillain Bullseye, reprising the role from the third season of the Netflix series.

These are all interesting developments, because they seem to mark a significant shift in how Marvel Studios is approaching the Netflix shows that ran between April 2015 and January 2019. Those Netflix shows have existed in something of a continuity limbo with the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe (the MCU). The shows themselves obliquely referenced events in the movies like “the Incident”, but the movies themselves never acknowledged the shows.

There was a sense in which this relationship demonstrated the power dynamics between two very different branches of Marvel content, the film studio that was overseen by Kevin Feige and the streaming shows overseen by Jeph Loeb. The shows needed the films to bestow upon them the patina of legitimacy, but the films didn’t need the shows in the same way. In October 2019, Feige would assume complete control of film and television output, seemingly killing the shows.

When the rights to the Netflix shows reverted to Marvel Studios in November 2020, there was a sense that Feige wanted a clean slate. While the company decided to bring back Charlie Cox as Daredevil, the actor made it clear that Marvel would be starting over with the character. “The fact that Kevin talks about it as being a season one, rather than a season four, my feeling is this is a whole new deal,” Cox stated in September 2022.

By December 2021, while acknowledging that he was open to returning to the role, actor Jon Bernthal was talking about his work as the Punisher in the past tense, about how he “was really grateful, respectful, and wary of the places where that role took” him. In March 2022, there were rumors the studio would recast both Bullseye and Elektra. In March 2023, it was announced that Woll and Henson would not be returning.

There was little to indicate Marvel Studios wanted a direct continuation from the Netflix streaming shows. Even the title of their proposed Daredevil show, while a reference to an iconic Daredevil story, drew a line separating it from the older shows. “They really, truly don’t want it to be anything like the Marvel Netflix Daredevil,” Chris Brewster, Cox’s stunt double, told the Ikuzo Unscripted podcast in July 2023, “And I think Marvel’s making a big mistake, but what you gonna do?”

Of course, these Netflix properties weren’t the only established brands to return to Marvel Studios in that window. Disney’s acquisition of Fox, which closed in March 2019, also saw the rights to the X-Men and Fantastic Four franchises return to Marvel Studios. As with folding of the Netflix properties under Kevin Feige’s baseball cap, this marked a consolidation of power for the studio. Just as with those streaming shows, it felt like Marvel Studios wanted a clean slate.

There was a sense these adaptations were aberrations, mistakes that needed to be corrected. “From the moment I touched down in Marvel, Kevin had been telling Avi [Arad] we have to get the rights back,” recalled writer Craig Kyle. “Kevin was in there to make great movies. That could never be a guarantee until we could actually control the process.” According to the book MCU, the plan was to let the X-Men brand lie fallow for a few years to make “it easier to introduce the MCU version.”

There was, perhaps, a sense of arrogance in this. Much of the coverage of these characters reverting to Marvel Studios was informed by a rarely articulated subtext: these earlier adaptations by other studios were “an embarrassment” and that the company would “save” or “fix” these properties and do them “right.” The unspoken implication underpinning these arguments is that there was only one way to make a comic book movie: in the style of Marvel Studios. Everything else was heresy.

To be fair, it’s easy to understand this hubris. In 2019, Marvel Studios was a dominant cultural force. The company was in the midst of an incredible run of critical and commercial successes. It was the most successful film franchise in history, and produced the highest-grossing domestic or worldwide release in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2018. Avengers: Endgame became the highest-grossing movie of all-time on release, and a crown jewel in a record-breaking year for Disney.

In this context, it makes sense that Marvel Studios would assume that they could do whatever they wanted with these properties and bend them to the house style. After all, the company had already introduced audiences to recast and rebooted versions of characters like Spider-Man (Tom Holland) and the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo). In June 2019, Feige even explicitly cited Spider-Man: Homecoming as a model for the X-Men, musing that “it's fun to now be in this position with the Fox characters, too.”

Of course, this tends to ignore the reality that there were perhaps things that Marvel Studios could learn from Netflix and from Fox. The output of both companies varied dramatically in terms of quality, but it was undeniably ambitious. The fight sequences in Daredevil were far more visceral than anything in the MCU. Noah Hawley’s Legion might be the best superhero television show ever made. James Mangold’s Logan got an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

The past couple of years have been humbling for Marvel Studios, as the company has experienced a significant fall from grace. This isn’t the end of the world; there are worse fates than not being the biggest entertainment company on the planet. It’s possible to debate how serious or how significant this decline has actually been, but there’s no denying that Marvel has reacted strongly to even the perception of this erosion of its cultural cachet.

There were reports of chaos behind the scenes: the departure of Victoria Alonso, the throttling of streaming content, the cutting of Echo down to five episodes and the choice to dump it all at once, the accounts of troubled postproduction on The Marvels, and the question of Jonathan Majors. This disruption also affected these recovered properties. In December 2020, Spider-Man: Homecoming director Jon Watts joined the Fantastic Four reboot. However, he dropped out in April 2022.

Amid this uncertainty, Marvel Studios has found itself in an ironic situation, nostalgic for adaptations it had previously regarded with contempt. Since 2019, the only MCU film to earn over a billion dollars or be the highest-grossing release of its year was Spider-Man: No Way Home. Not only was No Way Home produced by Sony rather than Marvel Studios, it also saw the return of Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, the stars of Sony’s earlier non-Marvel-affiliated Spider-Man franchises.

The most financially successful Marvel Studios release since Endgame was Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which saw Patrick Stewart reprising his role as Charles Xavier from the Fox X-Men films, a cameo spoiled in the trailer. Indeed, Marvel has yet to do anything with the X-Men brand beyond indulge in nostalgia for the Fox era, bringing back Evan Peters in WandaVision, Kelsey Grammer in The Marvels, and even the cartoon theme in Ms. Marvel.

There is something deeply fascinating in this, in how Marvel has bet its future on nostalgia for adaptations that it seemed eager to erase from the public memory just years ago. The studio’s only theatrical release this year is Deadpool 3, starring Fox veterans Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman. This will be a make-or-break moment for the company. Suddenly, Marvel Studios isn’t going to save the X-Men brand from Fox, the Fox X-Men are being asked to “save the MCU.”

The same is true of Daredevil: Born Again, which has had a deeply troubled production that involved a massive retool during the Writers and Actors’ Strikes. One of the outcomes of this creative carnage was the hiring of Dario Scardapane, who had worked on The Punisher at Netflix, to serve as showrunner. As with Deadpool 3, there is a sense that Marvel has a lot hanging on Born Again, and the retooling of it to lean into Netflix nostalgia feels like an effort to hedge the bet.

Of course, there is an inherent cynicism in all of this. It can feel like Marvel Studios is simply engaging in shallow nostalgia for these properties. Most of the returning talent from these earlier projects have been actors rather than behind-the-scenes personnel. A large part of what made the Netflix shows so compelling and unique was that they came from showrunners with distinct perspectives like Steven S. DeKnight, Melissa Rosenberg, or Cheo Hodari Coker.

Indeed, DeKnight himself has acknowledged that the soft reboot of Daredevil as Born Again is “an old Disney scam” that allows companies to avoid fairly compensating creatives. These references and allusions are designed to remind audiences of emotional connections that they had to earlier material, but without actually putting in the work that those earlier projects did to generate those feelings. Bringing back these actors to reprise these roles is just a short cut.

After all, there’s a reason that audiences engaged with the Netflix Daredevil show in a way that they didn’t for the earlier Fox Daredevil movie. That is because of the talent involved, and the way that it felt meaningfully different from the films that Marvel Studios was producing. The solution to the current challenges facing Marvel Studios isn’t to take these actors and feed them through the same meat grinder that produced the studio’s recent disappointments like Secret Invasion or The Marvels.

There is something deeply frustrating in all of this, because it feels like Marvel Studios is so close to understanding the problem that it faces. This embrace of characters and actors associated with different styles of superhero storytelling reflects the reality that the ubiquity and conformity of the company’s “house style” has left audiences hungry for different flavors of superhero multimedia. However, sometimes it isn’t just the ingredients, it’s the chef.