In an accidentally damning indictment of both the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s lack of harder edges and the entire Born Again fiasco, one of the directors behind upcoming series Echo has named Netflix’s Daredevil as one of its major inspirations.
Even though we’re talking about a project that technically has nothing to do with the Defenders Saga and features a character who debuted in Hawkeye taking center stage in a story that features a villain who also made their first MCU appearance in the same show with a cameo appearance from another who only has Spider-Man: No Way Home and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law on their resume, Syndey Freeland name-dropped Netflix’s hard-hitting favorite (per Collider) as a touchstone.
“The story dictated our approach. Coming off Hawkeye, Maya is a villain, so tonally, we wanted to lean into that. I don’t know if I can say this, but I love the Netflix Daredevil. It’s great. We also very adamantly wanted to show that these people in our show bleed, they die, they get killed, and there are real consequences. It’s not the fate of the universe at stake because once you go that broad, you can lose sight a little bit. And so, that dictated the tone.”
As the MCU’s first-ever episodic exclusive to be rated TV-MA, never mind one that stars Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock, the comparisons are obvious on paper. However, after Born Again was scrapped and restarted in part to becoming too different to its predecessor, it’s massively ironic that Echo has opted to use the Netflix OG as a point of reference as opposed to anything hailing from its own universe.