Charlie Cox Explains Why Superhero TV Shows Are Better Than The Movies
His answer above reveals two reasons why Charlie Cox believes TV handles comic book adaptations better.
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It’s no longer a difficult thing to find comic book movies and TV series to binge-watch. The bigger trouble may be finding enough time to catch them all. With so much content available, audiences now have room to debate which projects are best. One question that often comes up is whether TV shows or movies are doing a better job with comic book adaptations. Charlie Cox is an actor in a unique position when it comes to answering this one, and when ComicBook.com threw the question his way, his answer was an interesting one.
The actor just recently appeared in the Marvel movie Spider-Man: No Way Home as Matt Murdock / Daredevil. He had a long run on the Netflix series Daredevil. While his Netflix series has an audience rating of 89% on Rotten Tomatoes, the Ben Affleck Daredevil movie holds a 35% audience score on the same platform. With that perspective in mind, Charlie Cox recently shared why he believes TV is just better set up to tell superhero stories than movies are.
I think all of these characters lend themselves perfectly to the television format, because they are episodic in their original format. The deep fan base has learned to consume them in an episodic format in the comics. The thing I always said about season one of our show was that if you made the movie version, you kind of have to have him in the suit after 20 minutes, and you’ve got a lot of story to tell. And this is one of the mistakes I think the film made, which was that they tried to tell all the stories, they had Foggy, Electra, Kingpin, Bullseye, they had all of those characters in two hours.
Charlie Cox
His answer above reveals two reasons why Charlie Cox believes TV handles comic book adaptations better. The first is that comic books themselves are written in the same format as television. Movies are written more like novels. That perspective makes sense. His second point appears to be that TV gives more room for the ensemble casts to develop into characters audiences really care about. His experience working on Netflix shows would back this up. The streaming platform took the time to develop their Marvel heroes on their own shows and have them later meet up in a crossover spinoff series, The Defenders.
Charlie Cox had even more to reveal about why he strongly believes in the power of comic book adaptations for TV. He went on to explain that while he’d love to see Daredevil on the big screen, there’s just too much advantage to the television format.
We had 13 hours times three before we even brought in Bullseye. It would be really cool to do a Daredevil movie and to do this kind of one-off moment in time, but I think in terms of telling the story, it’s more fun to have more time to do it. The only caveat is that it would be super cool to see Daredevil on the big screen, that’s the only thing that miss out. But even now with movies, most of the movies, you watch them streaming anyway.
Charlie Cox
While he didn’t directly bring up the Daredevil movie with Ben Affleck, it’s hard not to compare. The movie was released in 2003, before the Marvel Cinematic Universe would expand the genre in an astonishing way. Daredevil was an origin story for the character, and it just didn’t do much to impress fans. They had to bring in Daredevil, his backstory, his origins, his character, and attempt to tell a story that meant something to fans. It just didn’t hit with audiences in the same way the Netflix series has.
When Netflix finally let go of their Marvel characters and Disney/Marvel got their hands on them again, fans were anxious to find out what would happen. Would we be seeing some new actor take on the role of Daredevil? It seemed doubtful that Charlie Cox would actually come back to the role, but then to the delight of fans everywhere, he has. Now, fans are waiting to see that happen again, and for other characters like Jon Bernthal’s Punisher and Krysten Ritter’s Jessica Jones to make the same kind of comeback. And will it be in the movies or in new series? While this has been a topic for a while now, Charlie Cox’s appearance in No Way Home is making it seem closer than ever. Hopefully, we’ll get answers on their Marvel futures soon.
