Comic book movie rights are very tricky things, especially when Marvel doesn't own the rights of a number of franchises. Some of you might not be aware of this but back in the 1980's, Marvel decided to sell the rights of a variety of their franchises to Fox because the idea of self producing films was a dream, especially something as huge as the Avengers. These franchises included Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Blade & Daredevil which is the subject we will be discussing today. Marvel & Fox had been fighting over the rights for the franchise for the last few months; with the original contract dictating that if a film based off the franchise is not put into production after a certain amount of time, Fox loses the rights and they revert to Marvel. It's why we got the somewhat unnecessary Amazing Spider-Man this summer, and why we got the awful Roger Corman Fantastic Four film in the 1990's that never officially got released: Let's just put it like this, Fox doesn't want to lose the rights to anything that could potentially make them some money.
In regards to Daredevil, the talks fell through and the rights for Daredevil have now reverted back to Marvel. Yet before this issue went down, Fox was actually working on a second take at the Daredevil franchise. Desperate to start production before they lost the rights, they approached director Joe Carnahan who wrote a draft and made two sizzle reels (depending on where Fox wanted to go with the franchise). The director released the sizzle reels (a demo reel or proof of concept intended to demonstrate a potential movie/show/project ahead of its creation), which use a number of pieces of other movies, motion comics takes on classic Daredevil artwork and a somewhat retro score.
Perhaps this Daredevil would have been a great adaptation, but like Superman Lives we may never know. Take a peek at what would have been with the PG reel above and the PG13 reel after the break!
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