29 Years Later, Marvel is Borrowing a Trick From One of the Greatest Crime Epics

Of all of the TV projects that Marvel Studios has in the works right now, few are as highly anticipated or under as much constant scrutiny as . Across its 170 minutes, that film maps the philosophical and mental conflict between Pacino’s Vincent and Robert De Niro’s Neil onto the city of Los Angeles itself — elevating their specific battle from a simple duel between a lawman and an outlaw into an operatic story of masculinity, solitude, and the costs of both the paths we choose to take and those we don’t.

Heat is, in other words, a perfect reference point for a series like Daredevil: Born Again. Not only is it an epic told on a similar scale, but it also shows how a crime thriller can deliver a series of increasingly tense and explosive action set pieces without losing hold of the conflict at the center of its story. There is an elegance to Heat that isn’t often found in the MCU, or in the superhero genre at large. (That said, the film was famously a major influence on Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.) There’s no way of knowing right now whether or not Daredevil: Born Again will be able to replicate Heat’s narrative grace, either, but Fisk and Murdock’s daytime meeting in its D23 trailer does suggest that the series has the right ideas about how to properly tell its story.

Wilson Fisk’s mayoral campaign doesn’t just threaten to give one of the MCU’s most tenacious villains even more power and, therefore, raise the dramatic stakes of Daredevil: Born Again. It also gives the Disney+ series the chance to actually envelope the entirety of New York City in his and Matt Murdock’s ongoing battle. Heat does that with Los Angeles by both setting different heists across the city’s landscape and wrapping up multiple, disparate characters in its central conflict.

By bringing Bullseye, Muse, White Tiger, and Punisher into the fray, all of whom practice vigilantism in vastly different ways, it looks like Daredevil: Born Again is trying to do the same thing. Indeed, despite all of the many issues it has faced over the last year, it really seems like the Disney+ series is striving to be a proper, sprawling crime epic the likes of which the MCU has never attempted before. If Born Again really does end up borrowing as many lessons from Heat as its first trailer suggests, then it has a good shot of being exactly that, too.

Daredevil: Born Again is set to premiere on Disney+ in March 2025.