Daredevil reboot and more X-men

We’re going to come right out and say it: some of us at Den Of Geek really quite like Daredevil, even going as far as to bestow the Director’s Cut edition of the film with our Underappreciated Movie status . The film, which took $102m at the US box office, was admittedly followed by the hardly-impressive Elektra movie (we’re not so keen on that one), but whenever it pops up on the telly, we’re perfectly content to sit back and watch it.

There are several reasons why a sequel never appeared. Firstly, there’s that underwhelming Elektra movie, which didn’t help. Then there’s the fact that Fox may have been hoping for a slightly higher final gross. And then there’s the Affleck factor. For post-Daredevil, Mr Affleck’s career had some, erm, ‘tricky times’, with a succession of flops, the media scrutiny of his relationship with Jennifer Lopez, and the career nadir that was Gigli.

In recent years, Mr Affleck has bounced back (Gone, Baby, Gone is a great movie), but his time in the Daredevil role is long gone now, and that seemingly was that for the franchise.

However, 20th Century Fox – off the back of a disappointing summer that saw Meet Dave, The Rocker, Babylon AD and The X-Files: I Want To Believe all bomb at the box office – has been trawling through its catalogue of franchises, and has seemingly pulled Daredevil off the pile. The plan, apparently, is to reboot the Daredevil movie franchise, and thus far Jason Statham has expressed interest in taking the title role.

Elsewhere at Fox, at it struggles to find big hits, there’s a determination to mine the X-men franchise for all it’s worth. Next year we get X-men Origins: Wolverine, and there may be a spin-off from that in the works, entitled Deadpool (the name of a character played by Ryan Reynolds in the new film). A young X-men project has apparently also been mooted, and we wouldn’t wager against a few more X-men Origins flicks either.

We’ll keep you posted. After we’ve gone and watched Daredevil again…