Vincent D’Onofrio’s return to the role of Wilson Fisk in the 2021 Marvel Studios Disney Plus streaming series Hawkeye helped carve out a whole new corner of the MCU. As Kevin Feige confirmed at SDCC ’22, Marvel Studios was taking their storytelling to the streets where heroes such as Spider-Man and Daredevil would lead the way. Spinning out of Hawkeye is the studio’s next streaming series, Echo, which sees Fisk return from what should have been a kill shot at the end of Maya Lopez’s barrel.
Despite some creative retooling, it’s expected that Echo will dovetail into another streaming series, Daredevil: Born Again, which will reunite Fisk with Charlie Cox’s Man Without Fear. Beyond that series, rumors point to the storyline continuing to be threaded into the fourth Marvel Studios/Sony Spider-Man collaboration, which was recently described as a street-level Civil War. Early rumors suggested that Daredevil: Born Again would adapt Marvel Comics’ “Mayor Fisk” storyline. Photos from the set of the series seemed to support those rumors as they showed a very distinguished-looking Wilson Fisk on the streets of New York. All signs point to very big things ahead for the Kingpin of Crime.
In an interview with Screen Rant’s Joe Deckelmeier, Marvel Studios’ Head of Streaming, Television, and Animation, Brad Winderbaum, responded to the notion that Fisk was being positioned to be the “Thanos of the street-level corner of the MCU.” “Oh man, you kind of hit the nail on the head,” said Winderbaum. “I can’t say too much, only that as a chapter in Wilson Fisk’s life, this is a crucial one and sets the stage in some remarkable ways for what’s coming next.“
While there’s been no official announcement by Sony about when a fourth installment in the Spider-Man franchise may appear, it’s been made clear by Feige that the project has been in development for some time and that writers have long understood the assignment for the film. For his part, D’Onofrio has made it well-known on multiple occasions that he’d like to see Fisk, who first appeared in the pages of Spider-Man comics, square off against the Wall-Crawler in Spider-Man 4. Though he stops short of saying it, Winderbaum certainly does nothing to turn down the heat on the rumors and, if anything, his comments are sure to fan the flames of an already hot fire.
