DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN Producer Opens Up About Season 2 After That "Cobbled-Together Frankenstein" First Season
When Daredevil: Born Again finally hit Disney+ in early 2025, fans and critics showed up. After everything that happened during its chaotic development, that positive reception felt like a hard-earned victory for Marvel Studios.
Now, as Season 2 gears up to unleash even more chaos in Hell’s Kitchen, executive producer and showrunner Dario Scardapane is getting candid about what it took to pull Season 1 together and why Season 2 feels like a whole different beast.
The road to Born Again wasn’t smooth. Originally announced in 2023 with Matt Corman and Chris Ord serving as showrunners, the series had already shot several episodes before Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige reportedly decided the show needed a serious creative overhaul.
That’s when Scardapane, who previously worked on Netflix’s The Punisher, stepped in to help reshape the project.
Looking back, Scardapane didn’t sugarcoat what that process was like. He told SFX Magazine:
“The task of season one was a really sick kind of fun. They’d gone in a direction where it was a different kind of show. It was much more of a procedural, much more focused on the courtroom. We had a lot of that footage and kind of had to do this cobbled-together Frankenstein.”
The creative team inherited material from a version of the show that leaned more into legal drama than street-level crime saga. Instead of starting fresh, they had to reshape what was already there while steering the series toward something closer to the darker, character-driven tone fans associate with Matt Murdock.
The end result was a season that, at times, felt uneven but also packed with flashes of what the show clearly wanted to be. It felt like two creative visions wrestling for control, but considering the circumstances, it’s impressive the team managed to land the story as effectively as they did.
And according to Scardapane, that challenge came with an unexpected upside:
“But by landing really strongly at the beginning and end with an idea of ‘This is what the show wants to be, this is what the show is’, we were able to kick the narrative into the second season relatively unfettered.”
That foundation apparently opened the floodgates for Season 2.
Scardapane has already described the upcoming season as “f*cking brutal,” and the setup certainly supports that claim. After the explosive finale, Matt Murdock is gearing up to take the fight directly to Mayor Wilson Fisk, also known as Kingpin.
He won’t be alone either. Karen Page is back in the mix, and Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter) is set to reunite with her fellow Defender. Meanwhile, Fisk will be scrambling to hold onto his political power while enemies close in from all sides.
This time around, the creative team wasn’t boxed in by previously shot footage or abandoned storylines. The writers’ room largely returned, but with total freedom to craft the story they actually wanted to tell. Scardapane explained:
“Most of the writers’ room came back from season one, and the crew too. Now there were no limitations in that we didn’t have to write into existing footage, we didn’t have to finish out storylines that had already been started.
“The only thing that we had to take care of was the central Fisk vs Daredevil engine. It was great. You’ll see in some of these episodes that we were able to really let it rip in a way we might not have been able to last season.”
That “Fisk vs Daredevil engine” has always been the heartbeat of this story, and if the early footage from Season 2 is any indication, the show is leaning hard into that rivalry. The action looks more intense, the stakes feel higher, and the emotional punches seem sharper.
For fans who stuck with Born Again through its creative growing pains, Season 2 sounds like the payoff. With the narrative shackles off and the team fully aligned on what the series should be, this could be the season that truly defines Daredevil: Born Again.
Season 2 premieres March 24 on Disney+.
Via: CinemaBlend