New Daredevil Trailer

Today saw the release of a new trailer for Marvel’s Daredevil, the first of several interconnected Netflix series set in Marvel’s ongoing Cinematic Universe. There’s a lot to unpack here, but the two big takeaways are the first looks at new characters. We’ve seen a little bit of Deborah Ann Woll’s Karen Page and Rosario Dawson’s Night Nurse (and we got brief glimpses of them here) but this is our best look yet at Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin, and our first good luck at Scott Glenn as Stick, looking for all the world like a Frank Miller sketch come to life.

The trailer does some cool things, and some very disappointing ones. It brilliantly subverts the old superhero-trailer chestnut of the opening narration about one man making a difference, by having the villain deliver it. It then takes the brilliant moment and pushes it into eye-rolling obviousness by ACTUALLY HAVING the following dialogue exchange:

Kingpin: “We have a lot in common, you and I.”
Daredevil: “WE ARE NOTHING ALIKE!”

…it’s 2015. Let’s maybe trust our audiences to infer similarities between the hero and the villain instead of having our characters histrionically state it outright like this is a 70’s Doctor Who or a Stan Lee Spider-Man comic. It hurts all the more because the first ten seconds of the trailer do such a beautiful job of illustrating the point that they really didn’t need to make it verbally.

That said, there’s also a lot of really cool stuff in here. Kingpin continues to look like a high point. There’s some great stunt work and an intriguing glimpse at Vondie Curtis-Hall going all connect-the-dots as Ben Urich and what looks like an all-out war in the streets. There’s even what sure looks like a Hand ninja, which is interesting. The Hand are intricately tied up with Elektra and she’s not due to make an appearance, as far as we know. It’s interesting to see what parts of the DD mythos are getting tossed into the soup and what’s getting left out.

That one little dialogue snafu aside, this trailer has me more excited than ever to see what becomes of Daredevil. The show hits Netflix in its entirety on April 10th. You can check the trailer out for yourself below.