‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ Star Exited Major Marvel Production, Speaks Out
Daredevil: Born Again has been praised for picking up right where Netflix’s Daredevil left off, but the road to that continuity wasn’t smooth.
Before Marvel Studios overhauled the Disney+ series, Jon Bernthal (Frank Castle/The Punisher) says he had already reached his breaking point with the character.
Bernthal first played Frank Castle in Daredevil‘s second season before headlining his own spinoff, The Punisher, which ran for two seasons on Netflix before cancellation. When Marvel Studios revived the character for Born Again, originally announced in 2022 as an eighteen-episode hybrid reboot, Bernthal returned — but not without friction behind the scenes.
Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, Bernthal revealed he initially walked away from the project entirely over how Frank Castle was being written. “I didn’t like what they had for Frank at all,” he told the outlet. The opportunity to fix that came only after production stalled during the 2023 Writers’ Strike, when original showrunners Chris Ord and Matt Corman departed the project. “Ultimately, they gave me something that they let me rework and rewrite — and they aired that,” Bernthal said. “It worked for them.”
That insistence on creative control isn’t new for Bernthal. He described a similar fight over One Last Kill, a standalone Punisher special he co-wrote with director Reinaldo Marcus Green, to The Hollywood Reporter as the product of “five years of negotiating and navigating, of not doing a lighter version that maybe they wanted.” He added, “I insisted that I had to be the creative force behind it.”
After his return in the Daredevil series and his Punisher: One Last Kill TV special, Bernthal will soon appear alongside his The Odyssey (2026) co-star Tom Holland in Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026). The fourth entry of the Spider-Man franchise is directed by Destin Daniel Cretton and is expected to be the year’s biggest blockbuster–that is, until Avengers: Doomsday (2026) drops in December.
Marvel’s Reset Went Beyond the Scripts
The strike-forced shutdown gave Marvel Studios a chance to rethink Born Again from top to bottom. Dario Scardapane took over as showrunner, with Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead directing, and the show’s tone shifted back toward the grounded, character-driven feel of the Netflix original.
The single eighteen-episode season was split into two more focused installments, with a third season now confirmed. Karen Page and Foggy Nelson, played by Deborah Ann Woll and Elden Henson, were written back in after being left out of earlier plans, and Ayelet Zurer’s Vanessa Fisk was restored after an initial recast.
Charlie Cox (Matt Murdock) has since revealed that Tom Hiddleston was set to direct an episode of the original eighteen-episode version, telling the Happy Sad Confused podcast it was “one of the great losses of the back half of that original season” — even as he acknowledged the changes “made it much better.”
Between Hiddleston’s scrapped episode and Bernthal nearly walking away from Frank Castle altogether, the Born Again that eventually premiered bears little resemblance to what was originally planned. What audiences got instead is a series that leans on returning cast, restored continuity, and — thanks in part to Bernthal fighting for it — a Punisher that finally felt right.
What direction do you think the original version of Daredevil was going in? Let us know in the comments down below!
