Born Again, Dead Again
Marvel Studios finally cracked out to make good TV—right as it was no longer of interest to it.
This week, The Hollywood Reporter revealed that Daredevil: Born Again, Disney+'s revival of the 2015 Netflix series, would come to an end after its third season.
It's a fitting mirror: the Netflix show, simply called Daredevil, also only made it to three seasons before its own cancellation in 2018, as it and the sibling shows it helped spin up ran aground on Marvel Television's slow but sure re-absorption of the rights as Disney turned its focus to the small screen ahead of the debut of its own streaming platform.
Born Again, much like Daredevil before it, was also a major turning point for the studio's televisual ambitions. The Netflix original proved that Marvel content could transcend the growing structures of what made the MCU a box office smash—provide a mature change in tone that could cater to audiences outside of the broad-net family-friendly blockbusters and develop a world where the conflicts stuck to the streets of Marvel's world, rather than soaring into the stratosphere of superpowered weirdness. Born Again, meanwhile, became a rebirth in a moment of crisis for Marvel: a creative reset at a period of uncertainty around the studio's adaptation to streaming shows that essentially reminded everyone involved that the secret to making good TV was to actually make TV, rather than cutting up movies into episodic chunks and calling it a day.
Both the end of the original Daredevil and the end of Born Again reflect turning points in the priorities of Marvel Studios. It's just that the former reflected a turning point where Marvel really started to take TV seriously—and the latter reflects a turn where Marvel no longer sees it as interesting to do so.