If there’s one thing Marvel has done over the last five years, it’s fuck up your concept of time. Multiversal messes aside, we finally know when the upcoming Disney+ series Daredevil: Born Again takes place in the Marvel timeline, and things just got a bit more confusing.
The final season of Netflix’s Daredevil series takes place on 2017, a considerable amount of time before Thanos evaporated half of Earth at the end of Avengers: Infinity War. As reported by Collider, Daredevil: Born Again actor Wilson Bethel recently told Fan Expo San Francisco that the upcoming Disney+ series takes place five years after that final Netflix season. With that much time passing, we can expect fully formed characters that have been through a lot.
“It picks up five years later. And so in theory, these are characters who have all lived five years of life and all of the twists and turns that you take in the meantime.”
Daredevil: Born Again leading man Charlie Cox first spoke about these changes during an Empire interview, staring that in the new show’s timeline, “Matt’s made peace with his role both as a lawyer and a vigilante.” While this may be a new development for the Daredevil series itself, it won’t fully be one in Marvel canon. Cox appeared on Marvel’s She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, which takes place in 2023, and also appeared in Spider-Man: No Way Home which takes place in late 2024. That would situate the upcoming Daredevil series as a predecessor to those two appearances.
In those two appearances, we get a sense of this newfound balance of identities. In She-Hulk, we see Cox as lawyer Matt Murdock advising fellow lawyer Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany) to embrace her superhero powers as She-Hulk to exert justice when the law doesn’t work, showing he’s come to terms with the duality of his role in the world. He also showed this balance after having sex with her and exhibiting what may be Marvel’s first superhero walk of shame in full costume.
The same is true for his appearance in Spider-Man: No Way Home when he gave legal advice to Peter Parker and reflexively snatched a brick thrown through Parker’s window. When Parker, who normally has the quickest reflexes in any room he’s in, asks how he did that, Murdock again highlighted that balance between lawyer and vigilante by saying his superhuman feat is the product of being a really good lawyer.
That’s all well and good, but Daredevil: Born Again is going to have to show us how it fits within all of the events that have happened in the five years since the Netflix series. We still don’t know who from the Daredevil universe was affected by Thanos’s Infinity Gauntlet snap. The series also takes place before the events of Avengers: Endgame, when everyone who’d previously been evaporated was brought back. Since the series takes place before Thanos’ genocidal acts were reversed, we at least now know Daredevil survived the blip.
With Daredevil: Born Again situated between two of the biggest moments in MCU history, there’s potential for plenty of cool easter eggs throughout the series that refer back to that history. Those moments should help give us a sense of time, even if that time is Marvel’s confusing version of it.