I’ve always felt that if Fox had released the Director’s Cut of the Ben Affleck starring Daredevil into cinemas, it would have been a big hit. That version’s actually a really good movie, but instead we got a watered down, dumb flick that nobody cared about. Admittedly if Daredevil had been a success, it would have helped keep Ben Affleck’s acting career going and he may not have gone behind the camera and become a very good director – so I suppose it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other.
However despite 2003’s Daredevil movie flopping, there’s been talking of a reboot ever since. That intensified in February 2010, when Fox set The Last Castle and The Day The Earth Stood Still screenwriter David Scarpa to come up with a new take on the blind superhero.
Now Variety reports that David Slade has come on board to direct. While the fact he helmed Twilight: Eclipse may make some people groan, that wasn’t actually a bad movie, and he’s also the guy behind 30 Days Of Night and Hard Candy. Slade had been in talks about directing the Wolverine sequel, before Darren Aronofsky got the job, and now it seems Fox is giving him another superhero to mould.
It also appears that while Scarpa had been on Daredevil scripting duties, they’re starting over now a director has come onboard, as no writer is currently attached.
It’ll be interesting to see what direction they take the character of Matt Murdock/Daredevil. In 2003, Mark Steven Johnson tried to make something that was action-packed, intense and had a fairly interesting story, but the version that actually hit cinemas was tepic, generic and more than a little stupid. A blind superhero is definitely something that could be made interesting on screen, and Fox seems confident it can work – let’s just hope they don’t interefere too much with Slade, as they did with Johnson.