Daredevil: Born Again Ratings Are Bad

Television

Daredevil may be born again, but he’s not bringing Marvel with him. The Disney+ revival of the acclaimed Netflix series was supposed to be the turning point for Marvel’s streaming shows, the one that pleased fans and finally got people to subscribe – or resubscribe – to Disney+. They even gave the show a creative overhaul (or so they claim) when the audience found out that Daredevil: Born Again would be a thematic departure from the original Netflix show, jettisoning everyone except Charlie Cox’s Daredevil and Vincent D’Onofrio’s villainous Kingpin and turning the dark, violent crime show into a comedy. Showrunners were replaced, Deborah Ann Woll and Elden Henson were rehired, and assurances were made that this would be the Daredevil everyone wanted. Skeptics and True Believers alike were expecting a hit. Well, we were all wrong.

Variety has a piece about the Daredevil: Born Again ratings, and despite more spin than a rinse cycle, they can’t make the numbers look good. The revival had 7.5 million views in its first five days. As a point of comparison, the series premiere of The Acolyte had 11.1 million views in five days. If you don’t remember The Acolyte, you probably didn’t watch it, like me, because I’ve heard tell of nightmares, vivid flashbacks of lesbian space witch chants, and people whispering “The horror” in Marlon Brando’s voice. The Acolyte was the Star Wars series from Leslye Headland that was so reviled and ridiculed that it was canceled about a month after its final episode despite a second season being set up. Daredevil: Born Again is doing worse than that. On the Marvel side of things, there’s Agatha All Along, the ill-advised WandaVision spin-off about Agatha Harkness that was also roundly mocked, which had 9.3 million views in its first seven days. I think we can make an educated guess as to why Disney – which Variety says “does not regularly release viewership information about its streaming shows” – only included the first five days of Daredevil: Born Again: if it released the numbers for the full week, they’d look even worse in comparison because apologists (or shills) wouldn’t be able to argue that the time frame wasn’t as long as those of the other shows.

The opening of #AgathaAllAlong appears to be roughly on par with that of “Percy Jackson and the Olympians,” which debuted with 13.3 million views in six days, as well as “The Acolyte,” the Star Wars series that hit 11.1 million views in five days. https://t.co/UnNt63tG5l

— Variety (@Variety) September 26, 2024

This is bad news for Daredevil: Born Again, and for Marvel, and for Disney+. For the streaming service, it indicates a steady drop-off in viewership, and not just for their Star Wars shows but for Marvel, their other big non-Pixar brand, as well. For the show, it means few people are watching, and that 82% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes may be misleading. (Agatha All Along has an 83% audience score.) I don’t like it much so far – maybe tonight’s episode will change my mind; we’ll know in a few hours – but the perception was that most people did; maybe I’m not in as big a minority as I thought I was. But the biggest loser here is Marvel because Daredevil: Born Again’s failure to launch means nobody trusts them anymore. From a marketing perspective, this show did everything right; it had great trailers that called back to the tone and themes of Netflix’s Daredevil; it showcased beloved characters that were originally going to be left out, like Foggy, Karen, Bullseye, and the Punisher; it teased plenty of gritty, bloody action; and it continually assured fans that Marvel understood its mistakes and was going to get this one right. (The one exception was when this dim bulb opened his mouth.) But too many Marvel fans didn’t buy it, and as a result, it got horrible ratings. This is what happens when you break trust with your fan base, when you treat them to five years of bait-and-switch advertising, when you force insufferable girl bosses on them, when you change formerly good characters into left-wing activists standing on the writers’ political soap boxes, when you denigrate the most popular heroes to prop up the useless new ones, and when you call your audience names because they don’t like it. They tune out. Like most people, I was confident that Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars would be massive hits regardless of their quality, but now, I’m not so sure. I think Marvel may be done.

Let us know what you think of the Daredevil: Born Again ratings in the comments!

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