We take a look back at Fox’s 2003 adaptation of Daredevil, which gave Ben Affleck his first superhero role.
In the first few years of the millennium, studios were finally getting hip to the fact that superhero movies, done in a comic-accurate way, could be big at the box office. Bryan Singer’s X-Men opened the door, but it was Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man that made the genre a no-brainer. One studio that was eager to get in on the comic book movie action was 20th Century Fox, which produced X-Men. They managed to get the rights to one of Marvel’s most enduring superheroes, Daredevil, producing a film that was solid, if unspectacular, when it came out on Valentine’s Day in 2003. The movie marked Ben Affleck’s first outing as a superhero and proved divisive among fans. Some say it’s underrated, while others say it’s dated garbage. Who’s right? Let’s find out WTF Happened to Daredevil.
The notion of making a Daredevil movie had been around for a few years before it eventually got made. In the late nineties, Chris Columbus had been planning a version to be made at Fox, but the rights were allowed to lapse, leading to Marvel approaching Sony, with writer Mark Steven Johnson attached. After the project was axed, the property was acquired by Arnon Milchan’s New Regency, with Johnson retained to write the screenplay and direct, even though at the time, his only directorial credit was a turgid melodrama called Simon Birch. However, internet critics of the era championed his script, and the idea was made to make this a harder-edged than usual superhero flick with a relatively low budget and a hard-R rating. Initially, actors like Guy Pearce, Edward Norton, and even Vin Diesel were sought to play blind lawyer Matt Murdock, who moonlights as the costumed vigilante Daredevil, only for the studio to eventually settle on Ben Affleck, whose friend, Kevin Smith, was a major fan of the character. Affleck himself said he read every Daredevil comic he could get his hands on. Initially, the project had a lot of promise, with it being loosely inspired by the Daredevil: Born Again comic run written by Frank Miller.
The cast was filled out with two more hot up-and-coming talents, with Jennifer Garner, a breakout on the TV show Alias, signing on to play Elektra Natchios. In contrast, Colin Farrell, who had once been considered to play Daredevil, signed as the movie’s villain, Bullseye. In a controversial move, Kingpin was race-swapped and played by a black actor, the late Michael Clarke Duncan, while Jon Favreau played Foggy Nelson.
So, how did Daredevil end up the way it did despite the high-profile cast? In 2002, Affleck’s career as a leading man was on a meteoric rise, with many believing he was only one role away from superstar status. He was already a tabloid staple thanks to his relationship with Jennifer Lopez, whom he was dating when the movie was initially shot. Colin Farrell was, likewise, a rising star. With this much talent involved, the studio started to shy away from Johnson’s R-rated take, especially since the very PG-13 Spider-Man became a smash hit. As such, Daredevil was given a heftier budget, but with that came many concessions to the youth market. Daredevil would no longer be R-rated, but instead PG-13, designed for teenagers. The movie was also given a wall-to-wall pop soundtrack, with not one but two Evanescence songs, plus tracks by The Calling, Nickleback, Moby, and pretty much everyone else you’d expect on a soundtrack from early 2003.
The folks involved also had to contend with 20th Century Fox, whose executives never seemed to understand that superhero films could be A-list movies. Instead, they considered them elevated B-movies, making a slew of these movies in the 2000s, which were both paid tribute to and satirized by the recent Deadpool & Wolverine. These movies were typically shot in Canada (Daredevil was the exception to this rule), were all PG-13, ran about 100 minutes, and cost about $70 million a piece. They almost always made a profit, but very few of them were good.
Daredevil falls firmly into that category. As an actor at the time, it couldn’t be denied that Affleck was hit and miss. He was great in movies like Good Will Hunting or the little-seen Changing Lanes, but he tended to phone in his blockbusters, so his two big stabs at franchises, this and The Sum of All Fears, fell flat with audiences. He was bland in the role. It didn’t help that Johnson squeezed an insane amount of content into a 100-minute film, with his origin story eating up a significant amount of screen time and the romance between Daredevil and Elektra feeling like something left over from an episode of The O.C. Many also didn’t care for the way Daredevil’s abilities were portrayed, with CGI used to evoke his sonar sense and how his optic nerve had mutated.
While some folks enjoyed Colin Farrell’s over-the-top scenery chewing as Bullseye, the film was generally considered a disappointment. It only did fair business at the box office, earning just over $100 million domestically and another $78 million overseas. Given the rumoured $78 million budget, the film did reasonably well when DVD sales were accounted for, but a sequel never materialized. Instead, Jennifer Garner’s Elektra was given a spin-off, for which her then-husband Affleck shot a cameo, only for it to be cut from the film. It was a box office disaster, with it widely considered one of the worst superhero movies of all time. Affleck himself swore off superhero roles, saying, “By playing a superhero in Daredevil, I have inoculated myself from ever playing another superhero … Wearing a costume was a source of humiliation for me and something I wouldn’t want to do again soon.” Of course, he ended up playing Batman for DC Studios in three movies, so clearly, he changed his heart.
The film itself would eventually develop a bit of a cult following, thanks to Fox releasing the R-rated cut on DVD, which reinstated a significant amount of footage, including a whole subplot starring the late rapper Coolio, which was cut from the PG-13 version of the film. Mark Steven Johnson would go on to direct another disappointing Marvel film, Ghost Rider. Eventually, Marvel would do right by Daredevil, with a critically acclaimed Netflix series starring Charlie Cox becoming a huge hit, to the point that Cox was retained by Disney, who recently launched a sequel series called Daredevil: Born Again, with Cox’s definitive performance now fully integrated into the MCU. As it is, the 2003 version of Daredevil remains a dated curio. It’s fun in a very 2003-way, but also a bit of a B-movie considering what was to come in the MCU.
