'Daredevil' Netflix Series Planned As Essentially One 13-Hour Movie

The boldest move Marvel is making in the next couple years is launching a set of four limited-run series on Netflix, all of which will build to one team-up event. Daredevil will be the first series that leads up to The Defenders, and while we know the target delivery window for the show is 2015, that's just about all we know. Drew Goddard (The Cabin in the Woods) will write and direct the show, but that's all we've got so far. But Marvel Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada — a man with deep connections to Daredevil — recently talked about the show, and indicated that it is being envisioned as basically one long movie, broken up into hour-long parts. 

Quesada was originally known as a comics artist, and helped revitalize Marvel in 1998 when he became editor of the Marvel Knights comic line. One big component of that set of titles was Daredevil, which was relaunched with a new issue numbering, and originally featured Quesada drawing from scripts by Kevin Smith. In 2000, Quesada became the first artist to become Editor in Chief of Marvel, and continues to work for the company now as its Chief Creative Officer.

So, when talking to CBR about doing shows for Netflix, and Daredevil in particular, Quesada says,

I've been working very, very closely with the entire team on all levels of the show. I think everybody knows my relationship with the character of Daredevil, and how important the character is to me — not just on an emotional front, but on a professional front. How DD brought me back here to Marvel, and how instrumental he was to even me being in this particular position I'm in today. I'm very involved with the show, as well as everything that we're doing with the Netflix shows. I'm incredibly excited, plus the dark and gritty noir world of DD and the Netflix characters, it's kind of where I live so it naturally attracts me to begin with.

He emphasizes that this isn't about trying to erase the memory of anything that came before," and says "We're going into the show trying to create something that's incredibly exciting, incredibly engaging, and will give our fans something that they love, something that's unexpected, something that's going to keep them coming back for more."

So what's that going to be? Details are scant, of course, as the show is two years away. But this is the good bit:

One of the advantages is really from the planning stage — obviously it's much easier to work with a smaller number of episodes than it is with a larger number of episodes. We can sit there and look at 13 episodes and plan it out as a very large movie. It makes seeing the bigger picture a little bit easier... You can't deny that there will be binge-viewing. You know that there are going to be some Marvel fans that when this show premieres, they are going to go on to Netflix, and they are going to sit there for 12 to 13-plus hours, and watch the entire thing all the way through. It's going to happen. The Netflix model offers us the advantage of being able to construct the show in a manner that is very different than a weekly network TV show... With weekly TV, you sit there and go, "The audience may not want to wait two or three weeks to get this particular bit of information." Whereas with Netflix, we might be able to hold onto a particular piece of information, because they may just watch it two hours later.