The thorny issue of official Marvel Cinematic Universe canon has been dominating the online discourse recently, specifically in relation to the two most recent projects to hail from the all-conquering comic book franchise.
Spider-Man: No Way Home featured a cameo from Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock, while the big bad of Hawkeye was revealed to be Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin. At face value, you’d have thought that made Netflix’s Daredevil part of main MCU continuity, right? Well, it hasn’t exactly been cleared up, even if D’Onofrio remains adamant he’s playing the same character.
Then there’s the big watch reveal in the finale, one that created mixed emotions. Linda Cardellini’s Laura Barton as Agent 19 is awesome in theory, and hopefully in practice, but it marked the latest example of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. erasure, something the internet wasn’t best pleased about.
While he still wouldn’t confirm or deny if Daredevil if indeed part of the MCU’s Sacred Timeline, D’Onofrio did try to explain how it’s all connected in an interview with ComicBook.
“The trick is that you can’t connect every dot. It’s impossible. But, you can connect as many as you can. Like, we really tried to connect as much as we can. So, in my mind, and I think it will always be that way, it is the same Fisk.”
In short, D’Onofrio believes he’s the same Wilson Fisk we first met on a rival streaming service, we don’t have a clue how Cox’s Matt Murdock fits into the mythology, but we can say pretty safely that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. exists elsewhere in the multiverse, which isn’t exactly black-and-white.