Daredevil Season 3: 10 Ways To Make The Perfect Born Again Adaptation
2. Matt Needs To Go To Hell And Back Again
Marvel Comics
It's important to emphasise just how grim Born Again is as a comic book series. Literally everything bad that can happen happens to Matt Murdock in that book. Fisk finds out his secret identity, his girlfriend leaves him for his best friend, he discovers that Karen is in a really bad way, he gets disbarred, loses his apartment and, to top it all off, has all his possessions destroyed in a targeted bombing. Nice.
The point is that Matt goes through a lot, and despite having been thrown round the bend by other writers over the years (catching a break isn't exactly in the character's vocabulary), Born Again remains the biggest physical and mental test of Daredevil's history. Conveying that on-screen presents its own difficulty, especially since the source material is so sombre, but it's an essential part of the story.
Matt obviously makes it out okay in the end, but Born Again is still very much a story of resurrection (hence the title). Conveying the threat of a fully motivated, revenge-driven Fisk is essential to its success.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
