The Big Picture
A few weeks ago, Marvel’s major overhaul on Daredevil: Born Again was made public, along with news of the studio deciding to change basically everything about the way it used to produce its Disney+ series. Now, the first symptoms of these changes are starting to appear, with Dario Scardapane hired as the MCU’s first actual showrunner after the exit of former head writers Matt Corman and Chris Ord (who now remain credited as executive producers) and dynamic duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead tapped to direct the remainder of the series. A classic case of the right people, being at the right place, at the right time for Benson and Moorhead, as they are already familiar with how Marvel works from their experience in Loki Season 2 and Moon Knight, having directed multiple episodes of both. They are the perfect duo to take over Daredevil and, quite frankly, whatever other projects Marvel may decide to throw their way, too. But why is that?
Release Date November 30, 2023
Cast Charlie Cox, Margarita Levieva, Jon Bernthal, Vincent D’Onofrio
Genres Superhero, Action, Crime
Seasons 1
Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead Understand How the Marvel Formula Works
When Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige declared Phase 4 of the MCU over at SDCC in July 2022, the only thing we could all agree on was that nothing was clear about anything Marvel was doing. Ending such an important step after the culmination of the Infinity Saga with She-Hulk: Attorney at Law and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and not with a major crossover event didn’t make any sense and felt more like an emergency contingency than part of a larger plan. It felt like Marvel didn’t understand its own formula for the future; the only things that truly seemed to work were WandaVision and Loki Season 1 — and even that seemed somewhat disjointed. Until Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead came on board for Loki Season 2, that is.
This isn’t in any way criticizing Kate Herron’s great work directing Loki Season 1 — in fact, that’s one of the redeeming points of the show up until then. But it’s undeniable how Season 2 saw a jump in quality with the arrival of Benson and Moorhead. They have directed two episodes so far — the season premiere “Ouroboros” and the cataclysmic “Heart of the TVA” — but are slated to direct the next two episodes as well, which includes the season finale. A lot of this also has to do with Eric Martin taking over head writing duties (the closest Marvel had to a showrunner) from series creator Michael Waldron, but it’s Benson and Moorhead’s directing that allows for the series to really shine.
Marvel had a lot of trouble setting a formula for their post-Avengers: Endgame era (which is okay, it’s not easy to pick up from such an era-defining event), and it’s thanks to Benson and Moorhead’s vision that this is starting to become clearer. In Loki Season 2, they’ve managed to work the sci-fi elements that make Loki such a weird series in a way that doesn’t make it complicated despite all the timey-wimey shenanigans going on and names like “Temporal Loom” and “Throughput Multiplier” being casually thrown around. That’s because they understand that the emotional pay-off of all this has to be more important than the presence of these elements themselves. There’s absolutely no point in playing weird without a proper development arc for the main characters, and Loki has been nailing this with its title character (Tom Hiddleston), Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), and Mobius (Owen Wilson) — all of which experienced natural growth from the start of the season despite the series’ constant going back and forth in time and rebooting timelines.
This show deals with stakes that are so high, that it’s usually difficult for the average viewer to grasp. Trillions of lives are something hard to even fathom, let alone feel empathy for in a fictional context, but Benson and Moorhead make their existences matter in a way that’s much simpler to grasp by establishing their impacts on the TVA characters as something palpable. For example, we see B-15’s (Wunmi Mossaku) sorrow at seeing all the branched timelines be pruned by General Dox (Kate Dickie) in Episode 2, “Breaking Brad”, but her extending an olive branch to Dox in “Heart of the TVA” is a great way of imprinting upon the viewer how protecting the TVA actually means protecting these lives. The story has its merits, but this emotional outcome can only be conveyed on-screen through directing, and Benson and Moorhead prove in every episode of Loki that they can balance weirdness and emotion uniquely.
What Can We Expect From Benson and Moorhead on ‘Daredevil: Born Again’?
As great as they’ve been with Loki so far, Benson and Moorhead are going to face a whole different challenge with Daredevil: Born Again. The former is all over the place (time and space, really), while the latter is more grounded and realistic. These two shows have such completely different premises, it’s almost as if they were set in whole different universes — and they sort of are, in a way. One of the fun aspects of the MCU is the variety of genres it allows itself to explore, something that requires versatility and adaptability from its filmmakers, and Benson and Moorhead have already proven they’re capable of adapting their style to the project they’re working on. Before Loki, the duo had already worked on Moon Knight episodes “Summon the Suit” and “The Tomb,” both of which are filled with mystery, dramatic reveals, and, of course, action. They do have all the surrealistic approach that the very characters of Marc Spector and Steven Grant (both Oscar Isaac) require, but, again, this is only inserted within the context of the story arcs of the episode, never the central pieces themselves.
This is closer to the kind of approach that’s required for a series like Daredevil due to the very nature of the title character. Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) is a blind man who fights crime with enhanced senses, which is already weird in its own way (not the same weird as Loki, of course), but he faces the sort of challenges that are more spiritual than physical, his Catholic guilt being the thing that both drives and limits his actions in a very similar way to how Marc Spector deals with his past and present actions in Moon Knight, too. This means that Daredevil is a story that usually comes closer to a character study rather than a bigger plot-driven story like Loki. Daredevil is naturally more character-driven, different from the magical Loki (as we see his development in Season 2 come as a consequence of the plot), but closer to Moon Knight (whose development comes from his own actions and how he reacts to them). There are major external forces driving Daredevil’s plot forward, of course, like Wilson Fisk’s (Vincent D’Onofrio) actions as a crime lord, and the cases Matt Murdock works on, but all that is still seen through Murdock’s eyes.
Benson and Moorhead Have the Artistic Vision That the MCU Has Lacked in Its Post-‘Avengers: Endgame’ Era
It’s crazy to think that Phase 4 of the MCU has so many movies directed by established directors like Ryan Coogler, Destin Daniel Cretton, Sam Raimi, and Taika Waititi, and still feel completely disjointed. There is barely any artistic touch to any of the movies, a symptom of the fact that they were directing for a franchise that didn’t know what direction it was taking. Of course, movies in Phases 1 to 3 also had to favor a more generalistic (if not downright generic) approach to filmmaking, but the artistic vision of their directors was still palpable.
After Endgame, Loki Season 2 is the only time this became noticeable again, thanks to Benson and Moorhead. We’ve talked at length about their work with Marvel, but the movies and TV series they’ve directed elsewhere also show their touch. Apart from directing, Benson also usually writes, with Moorhead serving as the cinematographer. This means they are fully aware of the weight of these different artistic traits in a movie and TV series, even if they aren’t necessarily performing them. For example, they are only directing in Daredevil: Born Again, as far as we know, but it reflects both in how the story develops and how it’s expressed visually. Loki finally brings the sort of beautiful and enticing visuals that not even Waititi’s colorful directing in Thor: Love and Thunder did, for example.
For Daredevil, this will be expressed in a more sober way, of course — much less colorful than Loki. It will all be about a more sensible approach to conveying the visual aspects of storytelling. In their movie Synchronic, for example, Moorhead’s cinematography does this many times, from capturing the lingering sadness of dimly lit places to the silent tragedy of scorched bodies. This is the sort of visual language that’s more aligned with what’s expected from a Daredevil series, and the two filmmakers have already proven that they’re able to work with this more grounded approach, no matter how weird the rest of the Marvel universe (or multiverse) is around them.
Loki Season 2 is currently streaming on Disney+ and Daredevil: Born Again will be available for streaming on Disney+ in 2024.
Watch on Disney+
