Unless Fox pull something rather spectacular out of the bag before October, it's looking as though the Daredevil character rights will soon revert to Marvel, and the promised reboot will have to be shelved for a little while to come.
As we reported earlier in the week , Joe Carnahan presented the studio with a pair of gritty, '70s-inspired sizzle reels, only for Fox to turn their noses up, a situation the director has been discussing on an American radio show.
"I was brought in pretty late in the game," he says, "and my take probably didn’t help matters since they had an existing script. But I just thought that if you were going to do it, this was the way to go. It was initially something I passed on because Christopher Nolan had done such a lovely job with Batman and unless you’re going to go after that trilogy, then that’s how you have to think. You can’t out-hurdle that, then what’s the point of trying?
"So it set the bar extraordinarily high, and I thought ‘Well, if we’re going to do this, let’s have a discussion about Hell’s Kitchen, and how it was really Hell’s Kitchen in the '70s,' so that got me really excited. But as I mentioned, the clock ticking and this kind of October drop-dead date, it wasn’t tenable.
"Having gone down this road in the past," he continues, "when you’re trying to write something and shoot it at the same time, it's disastrous. I think you’d need an adequate amount of time to put that script together in the right way."
It's a shame, as we really liked the look of the tone Carnahan was going for in his sizzle reels. Still, with the rights likely to revert to Marvel, maybe they'll give the director a second bite of the cherry. Fingers crossed...
