Tales From The Box Office: 20 Years Ago, Daredevil Fell Victim To Its Own Ambitions

(Welcome to Tales from the Box Office, our column that examines box office miracles, disasters, and everything in between, as well as what we can learn from them.)

20 years ago, comic book movies were in an odd place. "X-Men" helped open the floodgates in 2000, particularly for Marvel, but it was the absolutely astonishing success of 2002's "Spider-Man" that represented the point of no return. Thus, other superheroes quickly made their way to the silver screen in the years that followed, with mixed results. One fascinating example is 2003's "Daredevil," which starred Ben Affleck as the Man Without Fear, and his future wife (and eventual ex-wife) Jennifer Garner as Elektra. The movie wasn't quite a flop, though not quite a hit, and didn't start a franchise for Matt Murdock like Marvel's mutants and Peter Parker now had. It was an up-the-middle, modest misfire.

The project was originally set up at Sony, by way Columbia, but changed hands to 20th Century Fox. All the while, Mark Steven Johnson ("Simon Birch") was there to usher his "dream project" across the finish line. The filmmaker's Marvel Comics adaptation was billed as a dream project in an era long before Marvel was the dominant force in entertainment — and certainly before Daredevil was an A-list superhero. The film, as we know it, does indeed focus on a lawyer by day, hero by night, who is blind yet has other heightened senses. The plot, rather simply, sees Wilson Fisk (Michael Clarke Duncan) hire Bullseye (Colin Farrell) to kill Daredevil, which ends up putting him in the crosshairs of his own girlfriend, Elektra.

Unfortunately, Johnson's dream project was doomed to be compromised by studio interference and timing. In honor of the movie's 20th anniversary, we're looking back at "Daredevil," how it came to be, how Johnson's supposedly amazing screenplay failed to come through in the final product, and what lessons we can learn from it two decades later. Let's dig in, shall we?

Johnson did not lack vision, as he had been planning/hoping to make this movie for years. The double-edged sword of it all is that Fox really got behind the movie, largely thanks to the success of movies like "X-Men" and "Spider-Man." The problem was, it then became something that the filmmaker couldn't impose his vision on, as this was now a franchise play and not just some potentially profitable, mid-budget passion project.

While the movie has (had?) much to offer, including the late Michael Clark Duncan as a perfectly cast Kingpin, and Colin Farrell with a pretty unhinged take on the villain Bullseye, Fox decided to play up the romance between Daredevil and Elektra. That wasn't what Johnson had in mind, resulting in much of his original cut being scrapped. In that same Yahoo interview, he explained:

"One of the bittersweet things is that my director's cut had more of everything, and all of that got kind of condensed. At least a quarter of the movie was cut out, and there was a lot more character development [that was lost]. It's just a more complete movie. Some people love the movie, and some people hate the movie, but almost everybody likes the director's cut."

What's particularly maddening, one would imagine for Johnson, is that the script received very high praise. Producer Gary Foster billed it as "more character-driven," as well as "darker" and "edgier" than other comic book movies prior to production. Again, this was another time. The director's cut of the film surely reflects the praise in some way. Kevin Feige, now the head of Marvel Studios and one of the most successful producers in history, said ahead of filming that they "have one of the strongest comic scripts we've ever had." And Feige has damn well proven he knows what he's talking about.

While it is a tough thing to quantify, there is a general consensus that Johnson's director's cut is, indeed, a better film. Sure, Bullseye still looks a little odd, and we've still got the leather suits, but for its time, it is far better than what Fox opted for in the theatrical cut. It was a very early example of leaning into the source material being the way to go ("Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse"), rather than leaning away from it (2015's "Fantastic Four"). Even so, Johnson, in that Yahoo interview, shared where he went wrong.

"One of the mistakes I made with the film was wanting to put everything in! I wanted to do Daredevil's origin story, and I wanted to do the Elektra Saga and I wanted to introduce Bullseye and Foggy. I wanted everything to be in there, but the film could only support so much. And then when you're told to cut a half-hour out and make it more of a love story, things start to feel rushed and not quite right. It's a fan thing: when you love something so much, you want to tell it all."

While there are exceptions to these rules ("Avengers: Endgame"), generally speaking, it is best not to bite off more than one can chew in two hours with a comic book movie. Beyond that, Fox really fumbled the ball by leaning way from Johnson's vision and then getting way too ahead of themselves by doing "Elektra" as a spin-off, rather than perhaps doing a sequel and attempting to course correct. It was an early example of trying to build a universe quickly (Sorry, Dark Universe), rather than let things develop naturally. It doesn't work – it has never worked.