Principal photography on Daredevil: Born Again is well underway in and around New York City with various parts of different neighborhoods being transformed into key settings for the streaming series. Last week, pictures of a corner store in Harlem being remodeled as Hell’s Kitchen and Delicatessen made their way online and now filming has begun at that location and revealed it is part of a flashback sequence.
The location stretches down the block a bit and judging by the cars on set, seems to be set in the late 1970s or later. As seen below, a stack of newspapers on set are dated November 1, 1999 but while it’s tempting to believe that’s the time period for this setting, those are actually real newspapers. Valley News is a publication that serves the New Hampshire and Vermont region and the Patriots did really beat the Cardinals 27-3 on October 31, 1999 so they may serve only as a prop and the date may not come into play in the series. There’s also an issue with the fact that the posters seen on the store are all classic 70s posters (the Raid poster, for example, is from 1978), making the newspaper anachronistic.
Given the difficulty in nailing down the exact time period when this scene is set, it’s all but impossible to determine exactly what might be going on without further context. However, star Charlie Cox indicated in a 2022 interview that as part of Daredevil: Born Again being a “whole new deal”, the series may include a retelling of some events that had previously been seen onscreen in Netflix’s Daredevil series.
What’s great about that is that we potentially get to tell some of the stories over and over again, in the same way that they do in the comics. Every now and then they start back in the beginning of Murdock’s journey as a little boy and they tell the whole origin story again, so maybe we’ll get to do that. I don’t know.
Charlie Cox
Could that be what’s going on here? This scene looks to be set in the late 1970s. In the canon established through the Netflix series, Matt Murdock was 30-32 years old, meaning he was born sometime in the mid-1980s. That Daredevil series was set in 2015 while the MCU is currently set in 2025-2026 depending on what project is being viewed (Cox’s most recent appearance in She-Hulk is widely believed to be set in 2025). With the big-time jump, that would make Matt 40-42 years old in the present day of the MCU. If Matt was out and about in the 1970s, he’d be pushing 50 years old in present day.
It’s also possible that it’s not Murdock’s story being told at all but another of the series’ main characters: Wilson Fisk. The casting of Sandrine Holt as Vanessa Fisk in Daredevil: Born Again has raised some questions about just what parts of the Netflix Daredevil series are being considered canon in the MCU. It’s possible, given the length of the series, that Marvel Studios may be choosing to retell the origin of Wilson Fisk and Matt Murdock for the MCU.
Source: E
