Development In April 2013,
Marvel Studios president
Kevin Feige confirmed that the
film rights to
Daredevil and his associated characters reverted to Marvel from
20th Century Fox in October 2012, allowing those characters to be used within the
Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). As explained by head of
Marvel Television Jeph Loeb in 2015, Marvel Studios had "first dibs" on the character once the rights had reverted.
Drew Goddard pitched a new
Daredevil film to Marvel, but Marvel was not looking to create an
R-rated film, and Goddard did not want a "watered down version" of the character, as he also explained in 2015: "I went into Marvel and talked to them about making it as a movie a couple of years ago, long after the Daredevil (film)|[Ben] Affleck movie. But what we all sort of realized is that, this movie doesn't want to cost $200 million. The thing about Matt Murdock is, he's not saving the world. He's just keeping his corner clean. So it would feel wrong to have spaceships crashing in the middle of the city. But because of that, Marvel on the movie side is not in the business of making $25 million movies. They're going big, as they should". Marvel Studios eventually decided that the character would be better served in a television series. Although Feige had plans to use Daredevil in the films, the superiors of
Marvel Entertainment ordered Marvel Studios to focus the films on the
Avengers and the
Guardians of the Galaxy so the characters whose rights they had regained could help build a planned "television empire" under their direct control. In October 2013,
Deadline Hollywood reported that Marvel was preparing four drama series and a miniseries, totaling 60 episodes, to present to
video on demand services and cable providers, with
Netflix,
Amazon and
WGN America expressing interest. A few weeks later,
Disney announced that Marvel Television and
ABC Studios would provide Netflix with live action series centered around Daredevil,
Jessica Jones,
Iron Fist, and
Luke Cage, leading up to a miniseries based on the
Defenders. This format was chosen due to the success of
The Avengers (2012), for which the characters of
Iron Man,
The Hulk,
Captain America, and
Thor were all introduced separately before being teamed up in that film. In December, Goddard was officially hired as executive producer and
showrunner for
Daredevil, and his production company
Goddard Textiles produced the first season. Goddard was happy with the change to television from his film idea "because you can take time and deal with these smaller things, which to me are much more interesting on a character level". However, Marvel announced in May 2014 that Goddard had stepped down as showrunner to focus on directing a feature film based on Marvel's
Sinister Six team for
Sony Pictures Entertainment. Goddard, who wrote the first two episodes of the series, remained with the show as a consultant while
Steven S. DeKnight took over as showrunner, with his production company
DeKnight Productions producing the first season. The series was officially titled
Daredevil, with Peter Friedlander, Allie Goss, Kris Henigman, Cindy Holland,
Alan Fine,
Stan Lee,
Joe Quesada,
Dan Buckley, Jim Chory, Loeb, Goddard, and DeKnight also serving as executive producers. Kati Johnston served as a producer. In April 2015, Marvel and Netflix announced that
Daredevil had been renewed for a second season, but DeKnight would not be returning due to prior commitments. He was replaced as showrunner by
Doug Petrie and
Marco Ramirez, who served as writers for the first season and worked closely with DeKnight and Goddard.
Mark Verheiden, Alison Engel, Ramirez, and Petrie became executive producers for the second season, while Friedlander left the show. The series was renewed for a third season in July 2016, with Petrie and Ramirez intended to return as showrunners, but
Erik Oleson was announced in October 2017 to be taking over as showrunner, and Karim Zreik, and Oleson also serving as executive producers. Evan Perazzo served as a producer for the season.
Writing Elements of the series storyline were adapted from
Frank Miller and
John Romita Jr.'s 1993–1994 miniseries
Daredevil: The Man Without Fear, a retelling of the character's
origin story. Goddard had been a longtime fan of Daredevil after being raised Catholic, and identifying with the character's story of a "Catholic superhero struggling with the notions of right and wrong". He did not want to be "a guy that just takes the comics and then shoots them onscreen. I think it's our job to treat it as if it's our run. If I'm the writer of a comic book, you wouldn't just retell someone else's story, you would just take that ball and move it forward." In August 2014, when talking about the series in comparison to the 2003 film,
Ted Sarandos said, "The series will not be afraid to go darker than the film did. What we love about this particular set of heroes is that they're a little more down to Earth. Costume wise and also in that these are gritty crime stories, more in the streets than in the clouds." Elaborating on this, DeKnight said, "It is a little grittier and edgier than Marvel has gone before, but we're not looking to push it to extreme graphic violence, gratuitous nudity or anything like that. The story does not require that and I think [it] would suffer if you pushed it that far." Marvel Television head and executive producer Loeb later stated that, "There aren't going to be people flying through the sky; there are no magic hammers. We've always approached this as a crime drama first, superhero show second." DeKnight took inspiration from
The French Connection (1971),
Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and
Taxi Driver (1976), and stated that "we would rather lean toward
The Wire (2002–2008) than what's considered a classic superhero television show." Loeb compared the series' approach to telling stories over multiple seasons to "the world of publishing, where you have the Frank Miller, you have the
Brian Bendis run, you have the
Ed Brubaker run. I was lucky enough to do
Daredevil: Yellow (2001–2002). But they feel different. They have different elements to them. Same cast. In many cases, same tone. But a different adventure [...] you can watch
Daredevil season two without having seen
Daredevil season one. But if you watch each of them, it's like getting two different books. It's closer to the world of the graphic novel than it is to the world of the ongoing, serialized show."
Casting At the end of May 2014,
Charlie Cox was cast as
Matt Murdock / Daredevil. Though Quesada suggested in 2012 before Marvel Studios regained the rights to the character from the former 20th Century Fox that Cox was the right choice for the part, when Cox initially auditioned, the producers felt he was a better fit to play
Foggy Nelson. On June 10, Marvel announced that
Vincent D'Onofrio would portray
Wilson Fisk / Kingpin in the series, and on June 20,
Rosario Dawson joined the cast. A few days later,
Elden Henson was cast as Foggy Nelson, while on July 17,
Deborah Ann Woll was cast as
Karen Page. On October 11, Dawson's role was revealed to be
Claire Temple, a character resembling that of
Night Nurse, while
Ayelet Zurer,
Bob Gunton,
Toby Leonard Moore, and
Vondie Curtis-Hall joined the series as
Vanessa Mariana,
Leland Owlsley,
James Wesley, and
Ben Urich, respectively. In June 2015, Marvel announced that
Jon Bernthal was cast as
Frank Castle / Punisher for the second season, joining season one returners Cox, Woll, Henson, Dawson, and D'Onofrio. The next month,
Élodie Yung was cast as
Elektra Natchios, a character that had been mentioned already in the first season. In September 2015,
Stephen Rider joined the cast in the role of
Blake Tower. Cox, Woll, Henson, D'Onofrio, and Rider return for the third season.
Wilson Bethel was revealed to be joining them in November 2017, as
Benjamin "Dex" Poindexter, with
Joanne Whalley joining as Sister
Maggie Grace by January 2018, and Jay Ali joining as FBI agent
Rahul "Ray" Nadeem by March 2018. Zurer has a guest appearance in the season. On the casting process, DeKnight stated that "You just have to hope you find the right way. Luckily our cast came together, and I couldn't have been happier. No one will ever perfectly fit what's in your head. For me, the more important thing is not whether or not they look the part, but if they feel the part." Laray Mayfield and Julie Schubert served as casting directors on the series. In December 2017, D'Onofrio revealed he had "a standing agreement with Jeph Loeb", created before the first season, that allowed him to "come in and out of the show", with an unspecified amount of notice given when Marvel hoped to use D'Onofrio in the series.
Design Costumes Costume designer Stephanie Maslansky, talking about the inspiration and vision for the series, said "
Daredevil is rooted in the authentically gritty New York City neighborhood, Hell's Kitchen where Matt Murdock grew up. In the comics—particularly those of the Frank Miller era in the early 1990s—there were detailed illustrations we endeavored to bring to life in a grounded, gritty, and updated way, with respect and a strong nod to the original characters. We wanted to pick up where the comics version left off. I studied the illustrations from
The Man Without Fear,
Daredevil Yellow, and the issues of the 1960s, to which the newer collections pay homage. I wanted the costume design to reflect the illustrations of those volumes through a modern lens while maintaining a retro sensibility." Joshua Shaw, who has also done design work on
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013–2020), helped design costumes for several characters on
Daredevil, while Lorraine Calvert took over as costume designer for the second season. For Daredevil's red suit, introduced at the end of the first season, Marvel Comics'
Chief creative officer Quesada contacted
Ryan Meinerding and the costume artists and design team at Marvel Studios, who all contributed design ideas, with one of Meinerding's ultimately being picked. Quesada, who previously worked as an artist on
Daredevil comics, gave several suggestions, including the incorporation of some of how New York was created into the suit, which led to the use of rivets and "architectural" shapes. The suit is intended to look like a
Kevlar vest, and the black sections are an homage to comic panels where the artists highlighted certain areas with red, with "deeper portions" in shadow. On the mask, Meinerding noted the difficulty in designing the entire top half of a face that is intended to match the bottom half of an actor's face, "because half of his face has to be covered and has its own expression and the actor's face is going to be doing something else". For the
billy clubs used by Daredevil in the series, which were designed by
Andy Park, "There was a discussion early in the process, because Charlie Cox [and his stunt double] Chris Brewster are both right handed, of having the billy clubs holster on the right leg. But Daredevil wears those billy clubs on the left hand side. So while it would have been easier to place the holster on the right we all felt that we had to keep to the classic profile and keep them on the left." The suit was upgraded for the second season, with Calvert calling it "a much more fluid suit and much more tactical in a way." The costume department "streamlined" the suit to make it simpler, using less material on the gauntlets and boots. Cox described the changes as "tweaks" that were needed after seeing the suit in action in the first season, and noted that the changes are woven into the storyline of the season, including the need for a new, redesigned mask.
Title sequence The opening
title sequence was created by Elastic. The company previously created the title sequence for
True Detective (2014–present), which had stood out to the creators in terms of "imagination and delivering on what the show was about". DeKnight explained that multiple companies had made pitches to the creative team involving "variations of the same idea, where you zoom in on an eye and you see a sonar map of the city." However, one of Elastic's pitches had "fluid-like blood dripping over everything [...] as if paint were covering something invisible and revealing it", which both DeKnight and Loeb wanted to use immediately. Elastic's Creative Director Patrick Clair "came up with the idea of making a red world that was revealed by liquid." Simulating the CG liquid, which was meant to be an ambiguous reference to poison and blood that behaved like "something in between liquid chocolate and tar", was difficult, with Clair saying "It's hard to make an algorithm act 'insidious'". CG Lead Andrew Romatz elaborated that "Developing the right consistency and behavior of the fluids was definitely a tricky process. Getting the scale to feel right was something that we had to play with quite a bit in simulation and also in lighting and texturing. Patrick wanted the sculptures we were forming to feel like miniatures, so we did a lot of experimenting with scene scale and with camera settings, simulating depth of field to achieve that look." Fluids Lead Miguel A. Salek stated that "Each shot required custom flow maps to be painted on the sculptures, along with small attraction fields and thousands of tiny adjustments to achieve the shapes and behavior Patrick was looking for. In the end I simulated hundreds of tests and thousands of frames of fluids to achieve just the right balance for each shot." Due to time constraints, references to Murdock's boxing history such as a punching bag and boxing ring were cut from the final sequence. The final sequence was animated to a
temp track—"an old piece of 90s trip hop"—before John Paesano's music for the sequence was completed.
Filming Filming for the series took place in New York City, in areas of
Brooklyn and
Long Island City that still look like the old Hell's Kitchen, in addition to soundstage work. The production had an eight-day-per-episode shooting schedule. On the feel of the show, DeKnight stated, "We're going for a gritty, 1970s New York feel for the show. We love the idea of beauty and the decay of the city, and Hell's Kitchen being a place that's both beautiful and gritty at the same time. And that's why Matt Murdock loves it and wants to protect it." The series' action sequences took inspiration from
The Raid films. Matthew J. Lloyd was the director of photography for the first season,
Martin Ahlgren for the second season, and Christopher LaVasseur for the third season.
Daredevil was known for its hallway fight sequences filmed as
continuous shots. They occur in the season one episode, "
Cut Man"; the season two episode, "
New York's Finest"; and the season three episode, "
Blindsided". "New York's Finest" used multiple takes and editing to stitch together the sequence to have it appear to be a continuous shot, while the sequences in the other two episodes were done as a true one shot.
Visual effects and editing Visual effects for the series were completed by the New York studio Shade VFX. Bryan Goswin serves as visual effects supervisor. Editing for the series was done by Jonathan Chibnall, Monty DeGraff, Jo Francis, Michael N. Knue, and Damien Smith.
Music It was revealed that
John Paesano would be composing the music for the series in October 2014. The main theme of the series, which was co-composed by Braden Kimball, is derived from Paesano's original
demo for the series, which he submitted during the auditioning process. Paesano noted that it is rare for such material to be incorporated into a final score like this. A soundtrack album for the
first season was released digitally on April 27, 2015, for the
second season on July 15, 2016, and for the
third season on October 19, 2018.
Marvel Cinematic Universe tie-ins Daredevil was the first of the Marvel Netflix series, and was followed by
Jessica Jones (2015–2019),
Luke Cage (2016–2018), and
Iron Fist (2017–2018), which led to the miniseries
The Defenders (2017). In November 2013, Disney CEO
Bob Iger stated that, if the characters prove popular on Netflix, "It's quite possible that they could become feature films," which Sarandos echoed in July 2015. In August 2014, D'Onofrio stated that after the "series stuff with Netflix", Marvel has "a bigger plan to branch out". In December 2014, Loeb explained that "Within the Marvel universe there are thousands of heroes of all shapes and sizes, but the
Avengers are here to save the universe and Daredevil is here to save the neighborhood [...] It does take place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It's all connected. But that doesn't necessarily mean that we would look up in the sky and see [Iron Man]. It's just a different part of New York that we have not yet seen in the Marvel movies." Dawson later elaborated that "When you've got that level of superpowers, the fighting is different, the stakes are different, and it has a grander feel. In that world, they exist in it, so they know it and it's normal to them. But in reality when people are fighting and doing really bad, elicit [sic] crimes on the ground and there are guns and drugs—bones are going to break. People aren't hitting each other and nothing's going to happen because they're indestructible. These are people. They're vulnerable and you get to experience that." In March 2015, Loeb spoke on the ability for the series to crossover with the
MCU films and the
ABC television series, saying, "As it is now, in the same way that our films started out as self-contained and then by the time we got to
The Avengers, it became more practical for
Captain America to do a little crossover into
Thor 2 (2013) and for
Bruce Banner to appear at the end of
Iron Man 3 (2013). We have to earn that. The audience needs to understand who all of these characters are and what the world is before you then start co-mingling in terms of where it's going." In April, Cox stated that crossing over with the films is "possible. I think there's a way that the worlds can merge. I think our show feels tonally and thematically a bit different from the
Avengers movies, but it's all one universe and I feel like there's a way for Daredevil—and other characters,
Luke Cage and street level crime characters—to fit into that universe. I think there has to be a way, and I think it's about finding an autonomous tone for that [crossover] film". Cox also said that he is contractually obligated to appear in films if asked by Marvel. Cox expressed interest in making a
cameo appearance in
Captain America: Civil War (2016) due to Daredevil's presence in
Mark Millar's 2006–2007 "
Civil War" crossover storyline, which inspired the film, but acknowledged that he might had "missed the boat" due to
principal photography having already commenced by that point. While writing
Avengers: Infinity War (2018),
Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely talked about possibly having Daredevil and Luke Cage appear in the film's New York City scenes, but felt that including them for quick cameos would not have satisfied the audiences. == Marketing ==