In an interview with Los Angeles' KFI AM 640, Marvel's Head of Television Jeph Loeb was asked how Netflix's Daredevil series starring Charlie Cox will be different compared to the 2003 Ben Affleck film. Loeb says the show will be nothing like the movie, and will be more like the comics.
When we started talking to our actors and to our directors, this is with all due respect to the film, if you want to know what we're not doing, go watch the movie. If you want to know what we're doing, it's very much steeped in the world of the comics, but it also has a life of its own and that's really what television and our films really do is that we take the best….We hope and we're very confident that this is the beginning of something that's very exciting on Netflix.
That's great to hear, but it's not as if Jeph Loeb was going to say, "It's totally going to be just like the movie. Isn't that awesome!?" While I don't hate DAREDEVIL like some do, I was disappointed with the Mark Steven Johnson movie, and yes, that also goes for the director's cut. Loeb goes on to say Daredevil may exist in the same universe as the superheroes from the Marvel movies, but he's not fighting the same types of battles.
When I watched The Avengers, which is really one of my favorite movies, during the scene when the sky opens up, the Chitauri are coming and there's a giant battle over by Grand Central Station, even in the theater I was thinking, 'In the true Marvel Universe if you go about ten blocks over and an avenue down, there's a place called Hell's Kitchen and in that world are characters like Daredevil and Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, Hero for Hire, and those characters are not going to be involved in an inter-warfare-universe-colliding incident. That's what the Avengers do and they do it really, really well and those movies are incredible. We wanted to have an opportunity to be able to tell stories about our street-level heroes and how that they could possibly interact in the world of Marvel without it feeling like it's completely detached and by the same token feeling like it's part of that world. And it's very much how it is in the comics, which is that Daredevil — yes, one could argue that at some point he's been an Avenger but hey, you know, the reality is that so has everybody else [laughs]. The idea is that this is the world of people who are there to protect the neighborhood and if you believe in the neighborhood the way you believe in the planet then the emotional context is just strong.
I wonder if the Chitauri invasion will be mentioned on the series, and if Daredevil helped out at all. When there has been a major attack on a city in the Marvel comics, sometimes they'll show how a few of the less powerful characters were involved with the battle, even if they didn't "save the day." I know people are extremely excited for AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON, but the upcoming Marvel project I am the most interested in seeing is definitely Netflix's Daredevil.
Marvel's Daredevil will be released on Netflix in May 2015.