In yet another case of a superhero franchise having its reset button pushed, Deadline is reporting that an all new Daredevil movie is in the works at New Regency, the makers of the original 2003 Marvel Comics adaptation that starred Ben Affleck as a blind man with superhuman senses who practices law by day and fights crime at night. Former Fox executive Peter Chernin is producing and David Scarpa (The Day the Earth Stood Still) has been hired to write the screenplay, but no director has been announced.
It wasn't too long ago that remakes and reboots were met with almost universal derision, considered the last-ditch efforts of studios desperately trying to wring some earning potential out of established concepts in the absence of fresh ideas. However, when it comes to comic book movies, the reboot has become a staple that, some would say, is a necessity. A perfect example of this is the masterful way in which Warner Bros. salvaged its Batman franchise, languishing since Joel Schumacher's abysmally campy Batman & Robin, by starting from scratch with Christopher Nolan's dark and realistic Batman Begins.
In the case of Batman, the potential rewards of rebooting the franchise were obviously worth the risks, considering the franchise had already generated billions of dollars for Warner Bros. at the box office and in seemingly endless merchandising deals. For Regency, investment in a Daredevil reboot is a far riskier proposition considering the modest box-office take of the original and the fact that the Elektra spin-off would have lost a lot of money if not for international ticket sales (and still may have, when one factors in the costs associated with promoting it).
Still, comic book movies are the hot genre right now and will likely continue to be so in the near future. And, since New Regency doesn't own the characters — that would be Marvel Studios and parent company Disney — they stand to lose the rights to produce projects based on Daredevil, Elektra, the Kingpin, Bullseye, and other related characters if they don't get something in production soon.
Posted 02.06.10 by BrentJS