Yeah, let’s all stop in shock and marvel at this one: David Slade has decided he’d like to actually make a movie and has ditched the Daredevil reboot.
We’ve mentioned this off and on over the last year, mostly in skeptical tones because this is Fox. Fox is not built on giving Christopher Nolan final cut and placing their trust in filmmakers. Fox is built on marketing surveys and hiring absolutely nobody who has any sort of leverage if the studio decides to take the movie away from them and completely recut it. Part of the reason the first Wolverine movie was terrible was that the executives kept interfering right down to repainting the sets behind the director’s back.
Heck, part of the reason the first Daredevil movie stank on toast was Fox: The director’s cut doesn’t make it a good movie, but it makes it a substantially better and more fleshed out one.
Now it mostly becomes a matter of whether Fox wants to try and keep the franchise or let the rights lapse and have Disney take it back. Marvel has, obviously, been trying to recover all its characters so Disney can make all the money off of them. This is why X-Men: First Class got made and why Fox is desperately trying to reboot the franchise.
But what about Daredevil? They’re probably going to let it go. The last movie in the “franchise” was in 2005. Neither entry was well-received. And unlike X-Men, there seems to be little impetus at the studio to salvage the franchise.
But we’ll see. After all, releasing Daredevil would be a logical business decision. But in Hollywood, that often takes a backseat to spite.
image courtesy Fox