Joe Carnahan and DAREDEVIL, A Match Made in Hell's Kitchen

Managing Editor; Dallas, Texas, US (@peteramartin)
Joe Carnahan and DAREDEVIL, A Match Made in Hell's Kitchen

Director Joe Carnahan is a wanted man. We've reported previously that Continue, his action movie spin on Groundhog Day, is moving ahead at 20th Century Fox, and now Variety says that Carnahan is the studio's choice to helm the Daredevil reboot.

We were not terribly excited about David Slade, the studio's previous choice for the project, but Carnahan offers greater possibilities, especially in view of his recent, excellent work on The Grey, a real thinking-man's action picture. Combine that with the report that Fox wants to make a "Frank Miller-esque, hardcore 70s thriller," and the reboot sounds miles beyond the weak-tea 2003 movie version with Ben Affleck as blind lawyer-turned-superhero Matt Murdock.

Miller established Miller as a more street-level hero, involved in battling crime in the rought and tumble Hell's Kitchen neighborhood in Manhattan, and his sensibility would seem to mesh well with Carnahan. Of course, much would depend on the script and the actors chosen.

Fox wants to reboot the superhero characters the studio owns before their rights revert to Marvel, and Marvel is evidently willing to play ball with Fox because Marvel, in turns, wants the rights to use a couple of characters from the Fantastic Four universe currently owned by Fox, namely, Galactus and Silver Surfer. It gets even more complicated from there.

In a perfect movie world, I suppose, movies would only move forward when there was a good story to tell and the filmmakers were burning with passion to tell that story; that being said, if Fox's desire to hold onto their rights allows sharp, creative, and talented filmmakers to assert themselves -- never a sure thing at any studio -- something very good might emerge from all these negotiations.

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