Daredevil: Born Again Officially a Ratings Misfire for Marvel (Can Season 2 Recover?)

Say a Hail Mary for Matt Murdock. Marvel’s Daredevil: Born Again failed to chart on the Nielsen top 10 list of original streaming shows, making the Marvel Television series the first not to enter Nielsen’s streaming charts. (2024’s Agatha All Along, the WandaVision spinoff that was the first series to be released under the rebranded Marvel Television banner, notched 426 million minutes in its premiere week and charted over the course of its nine-episode season.) Marvel Studios’ revival of the Netflix-aired Daredevil series is the only live-action MCU show with such a distinction.

The first-week viewership of Secret Invasion cracked the top 10 in the summer of 2023 with a recorded 461 million minutes of viewing (equivalent to about 8.54 million views), while Echo debuted at No. 10 with 731 million minutes when Disney dropped the entire five-episode season in January 2024. It should be noted that Secret Invasion and Echo were made available on both Disney+ and Hulu, while Echo was the first Marvel series to release its entire bingeable season all at once. Echo was also Marvel Studios’ first TV-MA rated show, with Daredevil: Born Again being the second.

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Following Daredevil: Born Again‘s two-episode series premiere on March 4, the streamer reported that “Heaven’s Half Hour” and “Optics” reached 7.5 million views in is first five days of availability (Disney+ defines a view as total stream time divided by an episode’s run time). That was the biggest Disney+ premiere of the year so far, but fell short of Loki season 2 (10.9 million views over three days) and Agatha All Along (9.3 million over seven days, compared to Born Again‘s first five).

Born Again marks the first Daredevil project to be produced by the Kevin Feige-led Marvel Studios, which began integrating enemies Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) and Kingpin Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) into the wider Marvel Cinematic Universe starting with Spider-Man: No Way Home and Hawkeye, respectively, in 2021. Cox went on to reprise his role in 2022’s She-Hulk: Attorney at Law and again in Echo, which featured D’Onofrio’s Fisk in a larger role and set up his mayoral run in Born Again.

Premiering 10 years after Marvel’s Daredevil debuted on Netflix, Born Again also saw the return of Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll), Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson), Vanessa Fisk (Ayelet Zurer), and Frank Castle/the Punisher (Jon Bernthal). Newcomers to the MCU include Zabryna Guevara, Nikki James, Genneya Walton, Arty Froushan, Clark Johnson, and Michael Gandolfini.

Marvel Studios has since announced that Krysten Ritter, who played Jessica Jones across three seasons of her own self-titled Netflix series as well as The Defenders, has joined the cast of Daredevil: Born Again season 2. The currently-shooting second season will stream in March 2026 on Disney+ as Marvel TV shifts to more traditional annual releases of new seasons.

Unlike the rejiggered first season that underwent a creative overhaul after releasing head writers Chris Ord and Matt Corman, showrunner Dario Scardapane (The Punisher) broke the sophomore season from the start.

“I don’t want to oversell it. I do happen to think it’s some of the best writing we’ve ever had on this show,” Cox said of Daredevil: Born Again season 2 in a recent interview. “I am sure everyone always says that. I texted the showrunner, Dario, the other day and was like, ‘Obviously we’re still halfway through shooting it, but huge, huge credit to what you’ve pieced together here.’”

“He’s done something which I’m really excited about,” Cox continued, “which is that he’s fleshed out characters that in the previous iteration of the show often get left behind. So, it feels much more like an ensemble than it’s ever felt.”