Daredevil: Born Again Might Put A Very Big Worry About the MCU to Rest (For Good)

Daredevil: Born Again Cover ImageThe Netflix Marvel series have been incorporated into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and so the MCU isn’t entirely unfamiliar with TV-MA ratings. Once Echo came out in January 2024, the franchise got its first official entry with that rating, followed quickly by Deadpool & Wolverine as the first R-rated film. Before that, 2023’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.

3 had the franchise’s first drop of the F-bomb; in other words, the franchise has slowly but surely been building towards tonal expansion. It’s for the best because, for a while there, things were starting to get stale.There’s adherence to the formula, and there’s a seeming lack of willingness to take risks.



What has the MCU’s tonal maturation all been building towards? The finale of Daredevil: Born Again, apparently.What We’ve Seen So FarThe first eight episodes of Daredevil: Born Again have, unlike Echo, really earned their TV-MA ratings. But Episode 9, the Season 1 finale, is really looking to up the stakes.

A Redditor collected all of the preview footage that has yet to be seen in Born Again thus far and suffice it to say, it’s all the most violent stuff.The unaired footage shows Daredevil and a returning Frank Castle/Punisher fighting without pulling their punches; one guy gets what appears to be a sword or an axe to the face. Kingpin and Vanessa sit on a couch, with the former soaked in (Matt Murdock’s) blood after Bullseye’s assassination attempt, which closed out the Episode 8.

In terms of the less violent stuff, fans can apparently expect the return of Deborah Ann Woll’s Karen Page. Daredevil is also seemingly part of a fight alongside Punisher, brawling with Kingpin’s task force in a dark warehouse as rain beats against the windows behind them – mirroring a different shot of Karen, who is also drenched in rain. It looks like grim stuff, so fans can expect it to warrant a TV-MA rating – and then some.

“[The finale] is so brutally tragic...

. A bonanza of bonkers visuals,” director/producer Aaron Moorhead teased to TV Line, with co-director Justin Benson also teasing at least one specific moment of “extraordinarily shocking” violence in the finale. [RELATED: Born Again Season 2 Set Photos Spoil Major Marvel Villain’s Return]Teases of Born Again delivering such adult-themed content stand in fairly stark contrast to what the MCU has offered its fanbase up until now.

Even in Deadpool & Wolverine, with its surplus of expletives and its instantaneous flaying of Chris Evans’ the Human Torch, there was a light, jokey tone to the extreme moments. The closest the MCU has come to giving audiences intense, bloody combat is Echo, and while that series is an underrated entry in the canon, it wasn’t that much more intense than Hawkeye, which in film form would have just been a strong PG-13.Daredevil: Born Again Could Change the Tone of Future MCU Projects ForeverPhase 1 of the MCU was pretty much a critical and commercial success across the board.

Iron Man checked both boxes; Iron Man 2 checked the latter box, and both Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger checked both boxes (though not to the extent of the Iron Man films). Then, when The Avengers broke records and dominated the summer movie season, it seemed safe to assume Marvel had found their tone and were going to stick with it. Don’t mess with success, right?Phase 2 was essentially more of the same, with only one entry (Captain America: The Winter Soldier) altering the tone by going towards more serious territory.

Same thing with Phase 3, where movies like Captain Marvel, Thor: Ragnarok, and Spider-Man: Homecoming all fell comfortably in the familiar PG-13 territory. Even with a (hardly seen) decapitation at the beginning of Doctor Strange and the emotional stakes and/or deaths seen in Captain America: Civil War, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame, nothing ever so much as approached R-rated territory.

The advent of the MCU TV series in Phase 4 was where the franchise started to dip its toe in more age-restrictive territory. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier had Wyatt Russell’s John Walker beat a man to death with Captain America’s shield; Hawkeye had the return of Kingpin, and both Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Werewolf by Night had horror-themed moments that frightened some younger viewers. But, equally important, Phase 4 was where the MCU started to feel redundant.

And, with that, especially when it came to Eternals, concerns began to grow regarding the universe’s continued financial viability.Now here we are in Phase 5, where Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania flopped, The Marvels flopped harder, and Secret Invasion pushed more fans away from the MCU than it attracted to it. What has been the franchise’s biggest success? Deadpool & Wolverine and its hard-R rating.

That seems to have opened the floodgates to the MCU’s embrace of age-restrictive ratings, and, with Daredevil: Born Again‘s bloodletting and bone-crunching, it seems the MCU is no longer afraid to generate projects which fall far outside the tonal range of the Iron Mans and Guardians of the Galaxys of the world.Marvel content can be streamed on Disney+. The post Daredevil: Born Again Might Put A Very Big Worry About the MCU to Rest (For Good) appeared first on ComicBook.

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