Daredevil Born Again Is Ending After Season 3, and Marvel May Be Building a Yelena Belova Spy Show Instead

Daredevil Born Again is ending after its third season, and I want to walk through what The Hollywood Reporter actually said, what I think it means, and why a spy thriller called Zodiac might really be a Yelena Belova show in disguise.

On Tuesday, The Hollywood Reporter published an exclusive from Borys Kit and Rick Porter stating that the forthcoming third season of Daredevil Born Again will be its last. The decision comes about two months after the show's third season wrapped filming. The report also says Marvel has quietly parted ways with the season two showrunner, whose contract was up and was not renewed, and that this exit is happening in the middle of post-production, which the article itself calls eyebrow raising. It is unclear who will see the show through to completion. One source told The Hollywood Reporter that post-production is in its final stages, and Marvel had no comment.

Daredevil Born Again's Rocky Road From Netflix Revival to Disney Plus Reset

Born Again was greenlit in July 2022 as an 18 episode season with Matt Corman and Chris Ord as head writers, continuing a series that originally ran three seasons on Netflix from 2015 to 2018. Production stopped during the 2023 strikes, at which time Marvel decided to do a creative reset. Corman and Ord, who had wanted a more episodic structure and a lighter tone than the Netflix version, were let go, and the season two showrunner, previously a writer and executive producer on Marvel's Punisher series at Netflix, came aboard. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead of Loki and Moon Knight also joined as directors and executive producers.

The original 18 episode order ended up split into two seasons totaling 17 episodes, nine for season one and eight for season two. Season two ended this spring with Matt Murdock sent to prison. Marvel television has generally been trimming its Disney Plus slate lately. The final chapter of the Vision Quest trilogy starring Paul Bettany is due in October, and Disney Plus, according to The Hollywood Reporter, also canceled Wonder Man after initially renewing it for a second season, a pattern the outlet says is now repeating with Daredevil.

Season 3 Looks Like a Full Defenders Reunion, Even If Its Place in the Timeline Is Unclear

Krysten Ritter's Jessica Jones, Mike Colter's Luke Cage, Finn Jones's Danny Rand, and Élodie Yung's Elektra Natchios are all confirmed to appear in season three. I would not be surprised if Rosario Dawson's Claire Temple also shows up, since she shot a scene for Spider-Man: Brand New Day and is going to get asked about it repeatedly on the press circuit for Ahsoka season two in January.

It is not clear how or where this final season fits relative to Avengers Doomsday, a movie I expect will blow up the current continuity and form what is known as Battle World. Season three could run completely independent of the film side, or it could simply be set before Doomsday happens. Based on set photos, rumors, and the way season two ended, I have been expecting season three to be a true street level crossover built around Matt Murdock now being publicly outed as a vigilante.

The Numbers: Daredevil Had the Most Streaming Minutes on Disney Plus, but Also a 46 Percent Drop

According to Luminate, which tracks this kind of streaming data, Daredevil Born Again season two earned the most streaming minutes of any Disney Plus original series this year. But it also had very little competition, with only Wonder Man and X-Men 97 season two around it, no live action Star Wars show this year, and Percy Jackson season three not arriving until November. Troublingly, Luminate reported a 46 percent drop in viewership in the first five weeks of season two compared to season one, counting the same number of episodes year over year, which rules out the argument that a couple of double episode weeks skewed the math.

That drop happened even though many viewers felt the show had improved, fixing the disjointed feel that came from season one's reshoots and reconfiguration. Season two had real high points, and I think Bullseye creatively slaughtering a group of task force agents set to Billy Joel's New York State of Mind in episode 204 was one of the best sequences of the entire Marvel Disney Plus era. But the word of mouth was not strong enough week over week to bring back all returning viewers, let alone grow the audience, and I think trajectory is exactly the number tech executives running streaming platforms care about most.

Part of the problem, in my view, is that the show kept giving airtime to newer characters, including a storyline that ended with a character abruptly killed off in post-production, changing what was shot on the day and recontextualizing an actor's performance in the edit in a way I don't think social media would have let any other streaming show get away with. Speaking only anecdotally, I also think a lot of viewers simply did not have the bandwidth to watch multiple violent superhero shows in the same week, with many instead giving their attention to the final season of The Boys or to Invincible. Viewers are not monolithic, and plenty can watch several shows at once, but I think the spring saturation clearly did not help.

Why Marvel Streaming Shows Keep Getting Cut Short

The core issue is that Charlie Cox and Vincent D'Onofrio signed on for three seasons of this Disney Plus series, originally reworked from that 18 episode order down to two shorter seasons after the 2023 retooling, with season one's success justifying seasons two and three. What we are seeing now, across all of Marvel television, looks like a strategy shift, or maybe just a locking in of strategy, under Disney's newer streaming leadership, which includes CCO Dana Walden, Adam Smith, the head of Disney direct to consumer, and Marvel executive Brad Winderbaum, who reports to Kevin Feige and oversees Marvel streaming. Winderbaum is expected to give a fuller update at New York Comic Con in the coming weeks.

The real reason these series are hard to keep going, in my view, is economics. If the same show returns season after season, the budget balloons as returning actors and writers expect pay bumps. Disney has the money to pay creatives, but without huge season over season audience growth, dedicated advertising value, an awards strategy, or proof that viewers are watching specifically for that one title, it is hard for a streamer to financially justify a series beyond two or three seasons. "That's just the reality," and I think it is part of why so many of us dislike the streaming era.

The season two showrunner leaving before post-production finished signals to me that he was not happy with this decision. I can't blame him. It seems like he had plans to build season three toward a season four, and I don't think he wanted to be part of any reconfiguration in the editing room to wrap the series up instead. It is possible season three was meant to end with a cliffhanger of these characters looking up at the sky and seeing incursions, transitioning into Battle World ahead of Doomsday and Secret Wars.

Even With the Show Ending, Daredevil Probably Isn't Done in the MCU

If you wanted a fourth and fifth season and more spinoffs, especially to see Daredevil move past Kingpin as his defining villain, this news probably really is disappointing. But by the end of season three, Charlie Cox's Matt Murdock will have had close to 25 hours of screen time across three Netflix seasons and a crossover season, three Disney Plus seasons, and appearances in She-Hulk, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and Echo, more than any other live action Marvel character played by the same actor in our lifetimes. For comparison, that's roughly four times Robert Downey Jr.'s six hours as Tony Stark, and it beats the next highest total, Clark Gregg's nearly 18 hours as Phil Coulson across MCU films and seven seasons of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Destin Daniel Cretton has signed an overall deal with Sony and is confirmed to direct a fifth Tom Holland Spider-Man movie, expected in theaters in summer 2029. Chris McKenna, the co-writer of the Spider-Man movies who is also working on Avengers Doomsday and Secret Wars, recently shared a dropped storyline for Brand New Day that would have reunited Peter Parker with Matt Murdock. As I put it, "they love Charlie Cox," and if there is audience demand, there is always room for a proper Daredevil movie or special presentation. I'm confident that season three will not be the last we see of Charlie Cox's Daredevil in the MCU, and I think the studio sees the character as one of the easiest to plug into other projects.

Is Zodiac Really a Yelena Belova Spy Series?

When people hear spy or espionage at Marvel, many think of Nick Fury, but after Secret Invasion I don't know that Disney Plus wants to build its future around the 77-year-old Samuel L. Jackson as a lead, though I do think he could show up as a mentor cameo. My guess is that the codename Zodiac actually belongs to a Yelena Belova spy series, one where she could team up again with Hailee Steinfeld's Kate Bishop and other former Thunderbolts. Those, as I put it, are the kind of "big potatoes" I would want on Disney Plus.

I think Florence Pugh's Yelena Belova is a huge part of Marvel's future strategy in both film and television. Marvel Studios seems confident after the reception to Yelena's appearance in Spider-Man: Brand New Day and how she meshed with Spider-Man, giving us the big potatoes versus small potatoes terminology I think the studio will lean into further. In the same interview where Chris McKenna revealed the scrapped Daredevil storyline, he said the Yelena cameo in the Russian bathhouse was one of the very first things locked into the Brand New Day script during development, which tells me how much the studio prioritized it.

Pugh is the kind of major star streamers try to build subscriber driving vehicles around, and she is also an established Avenger from the films who, unlike some actors, doesn't shy away from streaming roles. A lot of A-list actors avoid streaming projects since Disney Plus isn't available in every country, making a theatrical film a more appealing use of their time, but that hasn't been an issue for Pugh. I think Marvel is going to build this Zodiac series around her, with Zodiac possibly being the name of a spy organization, similar to Spectre, that could include Kate Bishop, Bucky and John Walker and Alexei if they're still around, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus returning as Val, the kind of cast that could capture what worked in Thunderbolts and Hawkeye.

What Else Might Be Coming, and Why I Don't Buy a Full Retreat From Streaming

For the rest of those three to five shows in development, I'm hoping for companion series tied to the Mutant Saga, including an eight episode Wolverine anthology series, an idea pitched to me recently, that would follow him fighting in a different war across history. I'd also like a proper Young Avengers style Children's Crusade story pairing Joe Locke's Billy with his twin brother Tommy on a quest to find their mother Wanda, plus a limited series introducing Magneto.

After Wonder Man was cancelled in August, Collider reported a general scaleback for Marvel television and even a possible retreat from streaming altogether, which the Puck newsletter disputed at the time. But The Hollywood Reporter's article on the Daredevil cancellation leaves two doors open: Daredevil and adjacent characters will likely still have a future in the MCU, and three to five other Marvel live action shows are said to be in development. That doesn't sound like a retreat to me, though I'll also note that having several shows in development doesn't guarantee much on its own. This all landed in a week when GQ ran an unflattering quote about Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige from Mahershala Ali regarding a project that never got off the ground, so it's possible some of this framing is meant to soften how things look right now. I'm too cynical to think Disney would pull back from its most valuable franchise, and I expect Marvel to keep pushing its most popular characters onto as many screens as possible.

What do you think Zodiac actually is, and would a Yelena Belova spy series make up for losing a fourth season of Daredevil?