Daredevil Born Again returns Matt Murdock to the MCU. Check out crossovers, Kingpin’s ascension, courtroom showdowns and Daredevil’s new street-level legacy.
Matt Murdock’s ascent as the ultimate TV comeback tale with Daredevil Born Again. After his grim Netflix show was axed after three seasons in 2018, it seemed like the “Devil of Hell’s Kitchen” might be out of luck for good. Instead, Marvel pulled a master class in character rehabilitation.
Splitting him (and his arch-enemy, Kingpin) across four very distinct series — Spider-Man, She-Hulk, Hawkeye, and Echo — Marvel connected the dots between his grim, street-level beginnings and the bigger, flashier MCU.
Daredevil Born Again neighborhood hero became more than that now. He’s been raised to the ethical and legal foundation of the whole franchise. It’s not just a Season 4; it’s a character study of a man caught between the law and the mask, searching for justice in a New York still grooving to the chaos of the Blip.
The Road to Daredevil Born Again is a meticulously crafted “what-have-you-done-for-me-lately?” Marvel made four deliberate cameos to convince us that Matt Murdock could leave his first dark, solitary Netflix pocket and step out into the wider, stranger battlefield of the Avengers and then get his own show again.
The Movie Star Moment (Spider-Man: No Way Home): This was the “official” handshake. Catching a brick and standing in for Peter Parker, Matt demonstrated that he and Marvel live in the same universe as the Avengers. It presented him as a “really good lawyer” who still had keen super-senses and was ready for the big leagues.
The Vibe Check (She-Hulk): That was our first time seeing Matt—cute, fun, and draped in a throwback yellow suit. It showed him as more than “a brooding guy in a hallway” but an experienced warrior who could square off against beings like “Hulk-level” villains and still maintain his composure.
The Villain Upgrade (Hawkeye): This focused on Wilson Fisk. Raising the stakes Marvel elevated the stakes by making Kingpin durable against explosions and car crashes. Now he wasn’t just a mob boss he was a “global threat,” and his shadow stretched over the whole city.
The Final Link (Echo): Daredevil Born Again brought everything full circle. In a savage battle and an extended view into Fisk’s history, it served as a reminder that Matt didn’t stop fighting during the “Snap” years. It culminated with Fisk’s bid for Mayor, which paved the way nicely for the new series.
For ages fans were fretting that Marvel was going to force a “reset button” on Daredevil Born Again, retconning everything that made the Netflix show great. But after a sweeping creative shakeup at the top, Marvel made a pivot that encompassed everything: they were going to look to the past instead of running away from it.
The “Hard Continuation” Victory: Although Daredevil Born Again was going to be a “soft reboot.” However, Marvel replaced the original creative team with a new showrunner to continue as a direct sequel to the original three seasons. Matt’s past – his scars, his faith, his feud with Fisk – still matters. We already are into the deep end of the main story where it originated.
Matt survival from Thanos: It turns out that both Matt and Wilson Fisk survived Thanos’s Snap. With the Avengers either off-planet or mourning, Hell’s Kitchen was unraveling. This gap of five years is the “secret sauce” of the new story. It gave Fisk a chance to reestablish himself as a power in the collapsing world, turning his criminal empire upside down and presenting himself as a “savior” for a broken city.
A New Kind of Crisis: For Matt the Blip wasn’t just a simple logistical nightmare, it was a spiritual one. Daredevil Born Againcompounded his “crisis of faith.” If the laws of nature can just extinguish half the population, how is a blind lawyer supposed to believe in the “rule of law” on Earth? He’s starting this new chapter in his life with what has been the heaviest burden of a decade’s worth of ups and downs.
Daredevil Born Again renders stark reality in its depiction of a disease-ridden, drug-addled Matt Murdock that no one could ever forget. He has laid down the brass knuckles and picked up the gavel in his election as mayor of New York City, and is now using the entire city government as a weapon against Matt Murdock.
The “Kingpin Squeeze”: Fisk isn’t just dispatching thugs to Matt’s home anymore. He’s making being a hero illegal through the Anti-Vigilante Task Force (AVTF). By painting Daredevil as a public menace, he’s employed the “rule of law” to chase his nemesis with a badge and a siren.
The Ultimate Strongman: Fisk’s ascent is a masterclass in manipulation. He preys on the anxieties of regular New Yorkers who feel the city has deserted them, not the Avengers. He presents himself as the only person who can restore order in a post-Blip world, and is taking advantage of “good optics” — even as he’s blackmailing the police commissioner and threatening martial law.
A Criminal “State-Within-a-State”: Behind the scenes of Daredevil Born Again, Fisk is working on the “Free Port,” in Red Hook. He’s attempting to establish a special-trade zone outside federal reach. If he pulls it off, he will have created a legal “black hole” through which the Five Families can move whatever they want without the law’s pesky interference.
Matt Murdock is basically a man serving two masters, and Daredevil Born Again, that strain is at last beginning to break. He’s a lawyer who takes an oath to uphold the law by day, but at night, he’s a vigilante who violates just about every ethical rule in the book. This isn’t just a “cool secret identity” this is a deep professional and moral crisis.
Here is what the “legal nightmare” Matt is facing right now:
The Threat of Disbarment: If a Bar Association in the real world got wind of what Matt does by night, he would be disbarred immediately. Rule 4.2 prohibits Attorney from communicating with a “represented party” without the party’s attorney being present. Anytime he has a Daredevil pin a criminal and punch the truth out of them, Lawyer-Matt is making a huge ethical error. He is basically using his mask to violate the legal rights which he is obliged to honor.
The Conflict of Interest: Matt frequently represents clients not to aid them but to gather intelligence for his missions. This makes it a “material risk” that he isn’t acting in the best interests of his client — which is the worst thing you can do as a lawyer.
The Hector Ayala Meltdown: This firestorm touches off Matt’s meltdown. To exonerate Hector (the White Tiger) from a murder charge, Matt stakes everything: he unmasks Hector in court to prove his innocence. It works—they win the case but what’s the victory but a hollow victory. Hector is assassinated by a corrupt cop right after leaving the courtroom.
The transition to the main MCU is not just a change of location; it’s a solidifying of Matt Murdock’s world. The people around him aren’t simply ”background characters”—they are the scars and the fuel for his new mission.
Here’s how the inner circle has changed in this “older and harder” reality:
The Heartbreak: The Death of Foggy Nelson. Foggy wasn’t just Matt’s law partner; he was his moral anchor. His death at the hands of Bullseye (by order of Vanessa Fisk) is the ruthless “catalyst” for the series as a whole. It shatters the “Nelson, Murdock & Page” trinity forever, and sends Matt into a year-long tailspin. In fact, he temporarily retires the mask, worried that his rage might make him a murderer.
The Evolution: Karen Page as a Peer. Karen is a long way from, you know, the secretary. Daredevil Born Again she’s basically a lawyer in her own right, a professional equal who challenges Matt to be better. She’s the one who pulls him back into the fight, with her investigation skills, she digs to what was left by Foggy. “She Feeds Matt his Humour-Detecting BS and Then Keeps Him Human“: As far as who the true Page is in the gloves is concerned, that would be Karen Page.
The Dark Mirror: Frank Castle (The Punisher). The two used to spend all their time arguing about the “morality of killing.” Now they’re a “reluctant duo. The rupturing effect of Foggy’s death and the city’s decay soup on Matt is so palpable (NOT in the traditional sense!) that he is seriously considering Frank’s brutal approach. This is a heartbreaking indication of how much Matt has dropped, he cannot have a flawless sense of morality in a world that seems to be inherently rigged.
Now that the MCU is blasting off to space and multiverse madness, Matt Murdock is becoming the man who keeps the franchise’s feet planted firmly on the ground. He’s gone from “that blind guy in Hell’s Kitchen” to a cornerstone of Phase 5 and 6—essentially the Captain America of the Streets.
Here’s how Matt is assembling his “Street-Level Avengers”:
The Strategic Lead: The Avengers may deal with cosmic gods, but Matt makes the most sense to head up an organized opposition to Wilson Fisk. His legal brilliance, his “human lie detector” talent, and his tactical expertise make him the MCU’s connection from the city’s merciless truth to its sky-high heroics.
Mentoring Spider-Man: This is the partnership that everyone is eager to see. Following their short encounter in No Way Home, Matt now has the perfect place to show Peter Parker that you can’t just win every war with webs. He is the mentor Peter needs to survive in a world where the bad guy (Fisk) has a law degree and a mayor’s office.
The “Grounded” Anchor: Amid a world of magic and aliens, Matt ensures the stakes stay Earth-bound. He lets us know that though the galaxy is locked down, the block still might be rotting from within.
Matt Murdock isn’t just a supporting character now — he’s the head of a spin-off narrative arm that delves into corruption, systemic breakdown, and what it really means to be a “neighborhood” hero in a world buzzing with superheroes.
Read more:- The Green Lantern’s Guy Gardner Became the Heart of James Gunn’s New DC Universe
Ultimately, Matt Murdock’s story is not just about a hero returning: it’s about him coming home as the MCU’s streets’ cornerstone. He’s graduated from being a “neighborhood outlier” on Netflix to the moral compass of the entire franchise.
The cameos were the warm-up, Daredevil Born Again is the headliner. It is a definitive declaration that the Man Without Fear is exactly where he belongs right in the middle of the battle for the soul of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
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Discover how Marvel's First Family and Doctor Doom go from uneasy allies to bitter enemies in Marvel First Family & Doctor Doom Are Friends Until Doomsday.
Nobody expects that Doctor Doom, about to threaten every universe in the multiverse in Avengers: Doomsday, isn’t a stranger to the Fantastic Four. He’s family friend material. Reed Richards and Victor von Doom go back decades in the comics, and it’s confirmed after official comments from insiders reveal that it’s the emotional spine of the entire movie.
This isn’t the origin story where Doom shows up as a masked menace on day one. This is a slower, sadder kind of villain arc, and it’s exactly why Robert Downey Jr. signing on to play him made so much sense once you stopped picturing Iron Man and started picturing a man who lost everything and blames the people who once called him a friend.
Long before he was ruling Latveria and building doombots by the thousand, Victor von Doom shared a dorm with Reed Richards at State University. They were rivals in the lab, not enemies in the field.
The accident that scarred Doom’s face and pushed him toward sorcery and tyranny is tangled up with Reed’s own guilt — Reed warned Victor his calculations were flawed, Victor ignored him, and the explosion that followed set both of their lives on separate, colliding paths.
What makes their relationship genuinely unusual in Avengers: Doomsday is that it never fully curdled into simple hatred. Doctor Doom has, at various points, called a truce with the Fantastic Four to fight bigger cosmic threats.
He’s shown up for moments on with Marvel’s first family. Most strikingly, in the comics, Doom personally delivered Reed and Sue’s daughter, Valeria, when a pregnancy complication threatened both mother and child and he later became her godfather. That’s not a footnote. That’s a writer deliberately keeping the door open between a hero and his greatest enemy, generation after generation.
Why this matters for the movie: If the MCU is borrowing this dynamic, Doom isn’t being introduced as a stranger the Fantastic Four have to figure out. He’s someone Marvel’s first family already trusted. That’s a much heavier betrayal to write and a much heavier one to watch.
According to a widely circulated from industry leaker Daniel Richtman, the Fantastic Four’s Reed Richard and Doctor Doom are described as being on friendly terms heading into the film as people who have known each other for years rather than adversaries meeting for the first time.
The same rumor claims the fallout that turns them into enemies is essentially the plot of the movie itself, with Doctor Doom reportedly seen playing with Franklin Richards in a post-credits scene of Fantastic Four: First Steps. Vanessa Kirby’s Sue Storm saw them and tried to prepare to use her power to protect her son but the scene ended.
However, the scene made fans mind that Doom was an enemy, if he’s friendly then Sue may not see Doom as a threat and calm down.
“Doctor Doom is just playing with Franklin, he mean no harm to the kid” — Ritchman Says
Marvel Studios hasn’t laid out the Reed-Doom relationship on record. But it lines up too neatly with six decades of comics history to dismiss, and directors Joe and Anthony Russo have publicly described Doom as one of the most complex characters in Marvel’s library — someone they wanted to explore with “complexities and vulnerabilities” rather than write as a straightforward conqueror.
“He’s not simply a villain; he’s one of the most complex Marvel characters. He’s always three moves ahead.” — Joe Russo, co-director, on Doctor Doom
If there’s one thread connecting the comics history to the reported MCU plot, it’s Franklin Richards. In the comics, Franklin is regarded as one of the most powerful beings to ever exist — capable of warping reality, creating pocket universes, and reading minds before he can properly walk. The Fantastic Four: First Steps already introduced him as a baby who ages into a young child by the film’s end, and multiple reports suggest Doom’s interest in Franklin is central to why he moves against the family at all.
A godfather turning on the family he swore to protect, driven by what a child could become, that’s not comic book villainy for its own sake. That’s a tragedy with body count.
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| Title | Details |
| Title / Event | Avengers: Secret Wars (follow-up: Avengers: Secret Wars — Part II noted as Dec 17, 2027) |
| Release date | December 18, 2026 |
| Follow-up installment | Avengers: Secret Wars follows (sequel/next major MCU event) on December 17, 2027 |
| Main villain | Doctor Doom — played by Robert Downey Jr.; full costume unveiled at CinemaCon 2026 |
| Returning lead cast | Chris Evans (Steve Rogers), Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Pedro Pascal (Reed Richards), Vanessa Kirby (Sue Richards) |
| Fantastic Four presence | Seven characters from First Steps confirmed to appear, including HERBIE (the robot) |
| Directors | Anthony Russo and Joe Russo (returning to MCU since Avengers: Endgame) |
| Setting / premise | Heroes from three separate universes — Earth-616, Earth-828 (Fantastic Four’s world), and Fox X-Men universe — converge to face Doctor Doom |
The trailer shown at CinemaCon and in teasers has already leaned into Doom’s overwhelming power — a scene where he stops Thor’s Stormbreaker with one hand has become the moment fans keep replaying.
But the same trailer reportedly closes on a much quieter, more devastating line from Doom: “One day you will forgive me.” That’s not the sentence of a conqueror talking to strangers. That’s the sentence of someone talking to people he actually cares whether they forgive.
The MCU has struggled with villain motivation before — plenty of Phase Four and Five antagonists existed mainly to be defeated. Doom being a person the Fantastic Four actually liked, trusted, and maybe even loved solves that problem before it starts. They also don’t have to start from scratch in making us feel sympathetic for Doom; they get that from sixty years of history between Reed and Victor, and they get to spend their running time dismantling it on-screen rather than explaining it in exposition.
It also raises the stakes for everyone standing next to the Fantastic Four when Doctor Doom turns. If he’s willing to burn a friendship this old to get what he wants, nobody in Avengers: Doomsday is safe because they’re powerful. They’re at risk because they’re close to him.
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Doctor Doom isn’t a fascinating Avengers: Doomsday antagonist simply because he’s the most powerful person present. He’s compelling because he’s introduced as someone Fantastic Four already know, trust, and consider part of their lives. That background makes every encounter not just a fight to save the multiverse, but the shattering of a friendship that once felt unshakable.
If Marvel follows the emotional roadmap it set forth in the comics, “Avengers: Doomsday” won’t just establish Doom as the MCU’s next major villain. It’ll show how pride, grief, and unthinkable choices can turn a trusted friend into the deadliest enemy Marvel heroes have ever encountered. And now, with the multiverse at stake and Reed Richards facing the friend he couldn’t save, the conflict is far more tragic than your standard-oh-hero-versus-villain story.
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Discover every Marvel comic you need to read before and after XMen 97. Explore the essential storylines, characters, and iconic issues that inspired the series.
If you are currently watching XMen 97 and want to go deeper as it doesn’t come from nowhere. The show’s most exciting moments borrow straight from the Marvel comics, some of them are truly amazing. Writers take a comic arc that ran for a year and compress it into twenty minutes making it the most iconic show ever.
If you want to understand where this version of the XMen actually comes from, follow the list and start reading important XMen 97 comics in order. Everything started to make sense, but you must have patience for that.
This is the most essential comic that builds the character’s arc of Jean Grey, her transformation into the Phoenix that becomes the emotional backbone of the entire show. If you want to know which comic is still considered one of the greatest superheroes then pick Dark Phoenix Saga — Chris Claremont and John Byrne wrote this back in 1980.
The show brings back this story as unfinished business since fans didn’t like the original ending. This is what makes people go crazy about the show so read this first to know what happened to Jean on the moon.
This XMen epic collection is already running and introduced modern XMen before Dark Phoenix Saga even happens. This 70’s comic is the origin of Wolverine, Storm, and the team dynamic arc. Once you read it, you will understand why in the show they talk like they are the real family. Every relationship, joke, and grudge in XMen 97 was built here first.
God Loves, Man Kills is a short comic written by Claremont that actually gave the world the “mutants as a metaphor for prejudice” which every XMen adaptation follows and pulls back this tone and this one becomes a moral spine of the entire franchise from 1982.
XMen 97 pulls directly from this book’s tone whenever it deals with anti-mutant hysteria, and Magneto’s arc across the season only makes sense if you’ve read how his philosophy was originally built here.
The show’s early handling of Genosha as a haven for mutants, and everything that goes wrong there, has roots in a comic arc where the island nation was actually a slave state built on mutant labor. If you are watching the show then you should have been thinking that Genosha’s fate hit hard but if you read the comic the tone is darker.
The massive destruction of thousands of mutants on that island was a heartbroken tragedy that the show didn’t even fully present yet.
Read More 👉 Read Before You Watch: The Official XMen 97 Season 2 Comics Guide
Mister Sinister dispatches the Marauders to slaughter the Morlocks — a group of mutants living beneath the streets of New York City, resulting in one of the bloodiest massacres in XMen history. XMen 97 really doesn’t explain all the reasons why Mister Sinister is so scary. The storyline in this comic will tell you why. It reveals just how ruthless and dangerous he truly is rather than being a mysterious evil.
Take a time for this one because it is the bigger storyline, originally spanning four different comic series. XMen 97 draws on several elements from this crossover, it will help you fully understand about the time travel and Summers family legacy.
This narrative helps explain one of the more bewildering aspects of XMen mythos. If you’re looking for answers on exactly how Cable, Stryfe, Cyclops are related, this book has them. The epic feud between Cable and Stryfe culminates, and the convoluted, time-travel riddled past of the Summers family is revealed.
This story arc shocks everyone because it turned the both character’s arc. Since XMen 97 places so much emphasis on Magneto’s redemption, this arc gives a clear understanding on how low their trust goes that any chance of reconciliation becomes impossible. The moment where Magneto tears the adamantium from Wolverine’s skeleton marks the history in the entire franchise of XMen.
Based on how the first season of XMen 97 ends, everyone can guess that Onslaught will play a role in the future. The 1996 crossover event introduced Onslaught which created Xavier’s suppressed rage and trauma and became one of the most dangerous threats the XMen and Avengers have ever faced together.
If you want to understand how powerful Xavier’s psychology is, this one will surely help you. This is where the show is headed.
The entire essence of Bishop is that he has survived a mutant genocide in the future that hasn’t taken place yet and that fear is exactly what he brings to every encounter in the show. This is the arc where his history, as well as a fixation with stopping a specific kind of betrayal, are first described, and it puts a lot of his paranoia in the show into context.
A quick note for readers confused about Morph — the character barely existed in the comics under that name and role. Most of Morph’s presence in XMen 97 is original to the animated continuity, built from a character called Changeling who died early in Marvel history. There’s no single comic to point you to here, and that’s fine. Not every emotional gut-punch in the show has a comic-book receipt.
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The show is built to work without any comic knowledge at all. This guide is for viewers who finished an episode and wanted to go deeper, not a prerequisite. The most important comic is The Dark Phoenix Saga which is an absolute emotional and narrative center of the entire franchise.
This XMen 97 Marvel Comics guide will help you understand the deeper narrative that already lived in comics. You can read them one-by-one and they are all available on Amazon.
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