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Before Daredevil: Born Again, the Netflix Marvel shows felt like "a bit of a stepchild" to the bigscreen MCU, says Charlie Cox

One cast member even remembers being told by an executive they would "never cross over" into the regular Marvel Cinematic Universe

News by Graeme McMillan, Editor

Published on Sat Mar 28 2026

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For MCU fans, a long-running source of contention has been whether or not the original Netflix series — Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, The Punisher, and The Defenders — were really part of the MCU or not. It didn’t help that Marvel Studios had apparently changed its mind on that topic a couple of times… but according to some of the stars of those shows, even they were unsure about where the line between their shows and the big screen MCU actually was.

“I feel like we felt a bit like a stepchild,” Charlie Cox admitted during the Daredevil: Born Again panel at C2E2. “We would reference stuff that happened in the movies, but not directly… Like, we couldn’t say Iron Man or the Hulk, but we could say ‘the big green guy,’ or ‘the man with the iron hammer,’ or whatever it was.”

“What I remember also, and maybe I’m wrong in this, but I remember them explicitly saying, ‘you will never cross over into that world from where you are,’ like, you’re gonna stay in your basement,” added Wilson Bethel, who plays Bullseye. (It’s worth noting that both Cox and Krysten Ritter responded, “they didn’t say that to me,” leading Bethel to joke, “It was just me? Fuck this!”)

“I remember we came to set on Defenders one day, and [Robert Downey Jr.] has released something on Twitter,” Cox continued. “It was a fake poster, a mocked-up poster of an Avengers film that he just retweeted or whatever. But it had all of our names on it, and we were like, ‘Does this mean something?’”

Of course, with Daredevil: Born Again, the characters and actors are now very much part of the MCU, something that Cox said “felt like we’ve been adopted.”

Daredevil: Born Again season 2 is streaming on Disney+ weekly.

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Graeme McMillan: Popverse Editor Graeme McMillan (he/him) has been writing about comics, culture, and comics culture on the internet for close to two decades at this point, which is terrifying to admit. He completely understands if you have problems understanding his accent.