Ben Affleck's DAREDEVIL Movie Was Inspired By THE CROW and BLADE
Ben Affleck’s 2003 Marvel movie Daredevil was not received well by critics or fans. While it has some fun moments, and there was potential for a franchise at the time, it just didn’t click with audiences. But, years later a director's cut was released and it has been widely regarded as being a much better movie.
Daredevil was directed by Mark Steven Johnson, and since its release, the franchise has taken off in a big way thanks to Marvel Studios. What we are seeing now from Marvel is a very different vision of Daredevil than what Johnson was trying to do. In a recent interview with Yahoo! Entertainment, Johnson talked about the inspiration behind his movie saying that it was inspired by films such as The Crow and Blade:
"Yeah, X-Men was the first one where people went, 'Wow, you can take these movies seriously and do something interesting. That was the one that changed everything, it really was. For Daredevil, I was using inspiration from The Crow and Blade, and movies like that which I loved so much."
I loved The Crow and Blade as well, but for some reason, Daredevil just fell short of the bar those films set. The filmmaker went on to talk about a time before the MCU and how it wasn’t really that long ago that people couldn’t see these kinds of films being taken seriously:
"It was such a different world then. It's funny, we were developing Daredevil before the first Spider-Man came out and I remember people saying to me, 'I don't think that movie's gonna work.' I was like, 'Why? Spider-Man is one of the greatest characters.' And they said, 'Well, you can't see his face!' I remember telling people I was going to do Daredevil and they would say to me, 'You mean Evel Knievel?' I'd explain, 'No, he's a blind lawyer who has superpowers and heightened senses and he puts on a devil costume to fight crime.' And they'd be like, 'Oh, so it's a comedy?' Nobody knew who the character was then! The Marvel catalogue was so deep. And now everybody knows all the characters. It's pretty amazing how much has changed in 20 years."
It’s true! So much has changed over the years and the whole Hollywood landscape is now built around these superhero movies. It’s pretty crazy and incredible!