Daredevil: Born Again highlights one of my biggest (and the most unfortunate) issues with cinematic universes. Back in the mid-2000s, Marvel Studios began planting the seeds for a movie franchise where multiple superheroes could exist together. Gone were the days of movies like X-Men, Spider-Man, and Hulk having to keep things separate. Instead, all of these heroes would be able to crossover in each other’s movies or have big team-ups for things like The Avengers. It was a nerd’s dream, and largely, it’s still pretty great. It does come with some pitfalls, such as everything having to adhere to certain rules to make sure it doesn’t break the canon, but it’s still a cool cinematic experiment.
However, unlike comics, movies and TV are a bit more limited in their storytelling. Sure, the studios have the money and tech to make men fly, have over-the-top battles across space and time, and more, but there are other limiting factors. In a comic book, quite literally anyone can be brought into a story at any given time so long as there’s a writer and an artist to put it on the page. In a movie or a TV show, you have to make sure schedules for actors align, make sure it all fits within the budget, and perhaps most annoyingly, there’s the issue of rights. For example, Marvel and Disney do not own the rights to make live-action Spider-Man movies or TV shows; Sony does.
Spider-Man Not Appearing in Daredevil: Born Again Shows The Big Problem With Cinematic Universes
While Spider-Man has been integrated into the MCU with his own movies and crossover appearances, it is part of a very special deal that Disney and Sony have worked out. That deal does not allow Spider-Man to appear in Daredevil: Born Again. We have already seen Matt Murdock appear in Spider-Man: No Way Home, so the two characters clearly co-exist not only in the same city but the same universe, which wasn’t the case when Daredevil was relegated to Netflix.
So, when a show like Daredevil: Born Again causes the biggest street-level crisis the MCU has ever seen, Spider-Man not showing up is a big problem. There’s a major dissonance because there’s no logical explanation as to why Peter isn’t able to come in and help control the chaos happening in the streets. He could stop looting, protect people from being gunned down by cops, and much more, but instead, he allows innocents to die. He could’ve saved guys like Frank Castle from being locked away in Kingpin’s dungeon. This could maybe be excused for one night; they could say that Spider-Man was offscreen doing all of this, but with Daredevil building an army to fight back against Fisk, it won’t make much sense when Spidey isn’t included.
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We know Spider-Man isn’t on vacation or in space with the Avengers because he’s flat broke and no one knows who he is after the events of No Way Home. It’s also weird that someone like Doctor Strange isn’t helping out, but at least there’s the somewhat plausible idea that he’s somewhere else in space and time doing whatever it is wizards do.
This problem isn’t exclusive to Spider-Man either. While Daredevil can pop up in a Spider-Man movie, Kingpin can’t due to other complicated rights issues. There’s currently a huge story in the MCU about a psychotic mayor targeting masked vigilantes in New York City, even going as far as making a reference to Spider-Man himself, and the wall-crawler can not be directly involved in it because Spider-Man and Kingpin can not share the big or small screen together due to convoluted rights issues.
This Isn’t Just an MCU Problem
I get that everyone is trying their best to make the best entertainment out of these beloved IPs under the circumstances they’re given. It’s complicated, and I do love these stories – they’re just frustratingly limited, and sometimes, it doesn’t even involve complications with rights. Batman is confusingly absent from The Penguin. The show is great, but why the hell is Batman not coming in to disrupt any of these chaotic events impacting Gotham City? We know he’s aware of Oz Cobb and probably keeps some kind of tabs on him, yet he does nothing during the events of the show.
Now, everyone surrounding the show has to come up with some abstract reason as to why Batman isn’t there, like saying it would distract viewers if he were there. It’s more distracting that he’s not! If it’s a case of Robert Pattinson being too expensive or unavailable, then that’s the reality we have to live with – but it shouldn’t stop some stunt actor getting to cameo in a Batman suit for a brief shot. Unfortunately, it just continues to showcase the problem with these larger universes having to exclude some of their most important characters and creative crossovers for silly business reasons.
There’s ultimately a scaling problem with these cinematic universes. It’s great that we can utilize two different mediums to tell stories within the same worlds, but the problem is that it also requires creatives to bend their brains like a pretzel to explain why some of the most important characters aren’t present. Maybe a perfect world will exist one day where there’s not all of these complicated issues, but it might be a long time before that happens.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC Universe franchises are still releasing content in theaters and streaming.
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