Last summer, the upcoming Daredevil adaptation recruited Brad Caleb Kane, the writer-producer of Fringe, to start on the screenplay. Now they appear to have started over with a new writer, David James Kelly.
No word as to what happened with Kane’s script, nor how much of the script will be kept for the rewrite. As far as we know the plot of the film remains the same.
We had this synopsis last year:
“The definitive Daredevil tale! Karen Page, Matt Murdock’s former lover, has traded away the Man Without Fear’s secret identity for a drug fix. Now, Daredevil must find strength as the Kingpin of Crime wastes no time taking him down as low as a human can get.”
Any Daredevil fan will recognize this as the plot to Born Again, a Frank Miller / David Mazzucchelli scripted Daredevil novel.
If you’re not familiar: Born Again is for Daredevil what Year One is to Batman; not in the sense that it’s a retelling of part of the origin, but that it’s a gritty, very human tale of a part of the hero’s life. This is the point where Matt Murdock hits his lowest, darkest moments, and thus has the greatest, most dramatic climb.
The new film is thus not a ‘reboot’ or a new original story. It seeks to continue the story of Daredevil as seen in the comics, and will be ignoring the Ben Affleck version of the character. This will be a bit of an experiment, as it’s very atypical for a super hero film to go without an origin story on film somewhere. Counting on the audience to either have read the Daredevil comics or to not need to will certainly be a challenge. If nothing else, I have a feeling there will be some exposition at the beginning to relate the basics, or where Daredevil began.
The graphic novel is rather dark, and sort of noir, so I would expect the same of the film, very different from the Ben Affleck Daredevil. It’s also important to note that the original novel was written by Frank Miller, who authored Sin City and V for Vendetta, among other famous graphic novels and comics.
No production or release dates have yet been announced for this film.
