’Daredevil: Born Again’s Cancellation Proves It Waited Too Long for the Defenders

Image via Netflix Published Sep 23, 2026, 7:49 AM EDT Michael John Petty is a Senior Author for Collider who spends his days writing, in fellowship with his local church, and enjoying each new day with his wife and daughters. At Collider, he writes features, reviews, recaps, and conducts interviews. In addition to writing about stories, Michael has told a few of his own. His novella, The Beast of Bear-tooth Mountain, was released in 2023. His Western short story, The Devil's Left Hand, received the Spur Award for "Best Western Short Fiction" from the Western Writers of America in 2025. Michael currently resides in North Idaho with his growing family. Sign in to your Collider account Since Daredevil: Born Again premiered, officially connecting the Netflix Daredevil series to its shared universe of Defenders-related programs, fans have wondered whether the street-level vigilante team would reunite in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With the Netflix shows connected to the MCU, folks have long wondered why Luke Cage (Mike Colter), Danny Rand/Iron Fist (Finn Jones), and Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter) were never as present in post-Avengers: Endgame installments like Charlie Cox was as Matt Murdock/Daredevil. With all three heroes set to rejoin The Man Without Fear in the upcoming third season of Born Again, it's clear that Marvel did not need to wait so long for their return, especially with Daredevil facing a sudden and impromptu cancellation. 'Daredevil: Born Again' Could Have Brought In the Defenders Sooner Considering the show is titled Daredevil: Born Again, Daredevil was always meant to be the main focus of the Disney+ revival. There's no arguing that fact. Matt Murdock had been teased for years in films like Spider-Man: No Way Home and shows like She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, and it was about time that the Devil of Hell's Kitchen returned to that horned cowl. As the most successful character from the Marvel/Netflix partnership, fans had been clamoring for more Daredevil ever since the impromptu cancellation of his original series. So, we're not arguing that the Defenders needed to ever take center stage in Born Again or Matt's life. What we are saying is that it never sat right with us that a man like Wilson Fisk (Vincent D'Onofrio) would work his way all the way up to being the Mayor of New York City — especially after the events of Hawkeye and Echo, the latter of which also teased us with what Daredevil was up to during "The Blip" — and the Defenders, who last worked together to take down the Hand, wouldn't intervene. Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Superhero Team Should You Join? Avengers · X-Men · Teen Titans · The Boys Every team is a personality test with a uniform. One saves the world and argues about it the whole way home. One has been fighting for the right to exist since the day it formed. One is still working out who it is while the fighting happens. And one has no powers at all, plus no intention of playing fair. Eight questions decide where you actually belong. 🛡️Avengers(Marvel Studios) 🧬X-Men(Marvel) 🐦Teen Titans(DC) 💊The Boys(Prime Video) FIND YOUR TEAM → 01 What kind of power would you actually want? The power matters less than what you would be willing to do with it. ASomething enormous and obvious. I would not hide it. BSomething I was born with, whether I wanted it or not. CSomething still growing that I cannot quite control. DNone at all. I would rather nobody sees me coming. NEXT QUESTION → 02 Why join a team at all? Nobody puts on the suit for the reason they say out loud. ABecause some threats are too big for anyone alone. BBecause people like me are safer together than apart. CBecause I did not want to do any of this alone. DBecause somebody has to hold these people accountable. NEXT QUESTION → 03 How do you feel about the people in charge? Every team has a chain of command. Very few of them survive contact. AI will follow a good leader and argue with a bad one. BThey have never protected people like me. I expect nothing. CI am still learning who to trust, and getting it wrong. DThey are the problem. That is the entire point. NEXT QUESTION → 04 What is your role inside a group? Every roster needs the same handful of people to function. AThe big personality. I take up room and I earn it. BThe one who protects whoever arrived most recently. CThe heart. I keep everybody talking to each other. DThe one who says the uncomfortable thing out loud. NEXT QUESTION → 05 How do you win a fight you should lose? This is the scene the entire film gets built around. AOverwhelming force, and a very good landing. BWorking together in a way nobody saw coming. CRefusing to give up long after I should have. DPreparation, leverage, and one extremely dirty trick. NEXT QUESTION → 06 What is this work costing you? Nobody does this for free. The bill just arrives differently for everyone. AMy private life. Everybody knows my face now. BMy safety. The world is frightened of me. CMy childhood. I grew up faster than I should have. DMy peace. I cannot stop now that I know. NEXT QUESTION → 07 How should the world see your team? Half of this job is public relations, and everybody knows it. AAs icons. The team everyone is relieved to see arrive. BAs people. Just people, which is all we ever asked. CAs proof the next generation is going to be fine. DThey should not see us at all until it is done. NEXT QUESTION → 08 The offer arrives. What makes you say yes? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your team. AThe scale. If the world is ending, I want to be there. BThe promise that I would not have to hide anymore. CThe people. I would be joining friends, not an employer. DThe chance to take down somebody who deserves it. REVEAL MY TEAM → Recruitment Is Complete Your Team Is…Four teams, four completely different reasons to put yourself in danger for strangers. This is the roster you actually belong on, what they would want from you, and what it would cost you to stay. The AvengersYou belong where the stakes are largest and the personalities are loudest. This is a team of people who are all used to being the most important person in the room, which is exactly why it works and exactly why it keeps nearly falling apart. The Avengers are not friends who became a team. They are a team that slowly and reluctantly became friends, and you would recognise every stage of that process. You can hold your own among big egos without needing to win every exchange, which is the real entry requirement here. The arguing is part of the method. This group does its best thinking mid-disagreement, usually at volume, usually in a very expensive building. When the sky opens, they are who shows up. You would want to be standing in that line. The X-MenYou have never had the luxury of being thanked for this. The X-Men protect a world that has never once been comfortable with them existing, and something in you understands exactly why they keep doing it anyway. This is the only team on the list whose central conflict is not a villain. It is being wanted gone by the same people they keep saving. You know what it is to be the outsider in a room and to decide, anyway, that you will not make yourself smaller so everyone else is comfortable. The X-Men are the most genuine found family in comics. People arrive with nowhere else to go and are never once asked to explain themselves. You would not be joining for the glory. There has never been any. The Teen TitansYou do not want colleagues, you want your people. The Titans are the team where the friendship came first and the world-saving turned up afterwards as an inconvenient side effect. Every Titan is somebody's sidekick who decided to stop being one. That decision, not the villain of the week, is what the team is actually about. You would be joining people who are all working themselves out at the same time as you, which is far less lonely than being the only one. The Titans lose regularly. Then they eat together and come back better, which is a more honest model of growing up than any other team here manages. The tower would be loud, chaotic, and the first place that ever felt like yours. The BoysYou are not asking who to trust. You worked out the answer a while ago and it was nobody in a cape. This is where you go once you have decided the people in charge need watching, and that nobody else is going to do it. The Boys have no powers, no mandate and no funding. What they have is leverage, patience, and a very high tolerance for consequences. You are the person in the room who notices the thing everybody else has quietly agreed not to mention. This is not a heroic team and it has never pretended otherwise. It is a group of damaged people doing necessary work in ways nobody would call clean. You would not sleep well. You would keep going anyway. ↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ To be fair, the Defenders were never a formal team in the same way that the Avengers were. Yes, they banded together to protect New York, but then they all went their separate ways. Still, episodes of Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist continued to intersect these characters and their world for a reason, reminding us that they all still exist in the same place and are willing to help each other out when needed. If Kingpin is taking over NYC, it stands to reason that all hands would be on deck. It was already a bit of a stretch that Spider-Man (Tom Holland) wasn't more intimately involved (though there's no way Sony would have gone for that), but at least the wall-crawler was mentioned by Fisk as a nuisance. The Defenders, on the other hand, were virtually nowhere to be found — and that was a bit concerning. Sure, Season 1 brought back Frank Castle/Punisher (Jon Bernthal), only to write him off for The Punisher: One Last Kill, and Season 2 finally delivered by re-introducing Jessica Jones, but there's no reason that the rest of the Defenders couldn't have been included in Matt's war against Fisk earlier. Season 2 ends with Luke Cage returning for a small cameo, and we know now that all three of the other Defenders will be returning for Season 3, but at this point it all feels "too little, too late." As street-level heroes with plenty of fight left in them, Jessica, Luke, and Danny could have taken an earlier stand against Fisk — or at least stood beside Matt as he took on Kingpin solo. With the war against vigilantes that Fisk enforces in the first season, resulting in the death of Hector Ayala/White Tiger (Kamar de los Reyes), the Defenders had no reason not to stand up sooner — especially someone like Luke, who is literally bulletproof. 'The Defenders' Wasn't the Best Superhero Team-Up, but 'Born Again' Could Redeem It The news that Born Again will end with Season 3 makes us wonder if the next Daredevil season will be the MCU TV equivalent to Captain America: Civil War, where it’s essentially a Defenders story but with the Daredevil name... Netflix's Defenders was largely a bust (though still essential viewing for Daredevil fans), Born Again's third season could rectify some of that if done right. With Matt being locked up, now revealed as Daredevil, this unlikely group could come back together once more to ensure that New York City doesn't fall into chaos as a power vacuum is left in the wake of Kingpin's exile. Disney+ appears to be doing exactly what The Defenders did back during Netflix's heyday: concluding this Daredevil chapter with a team-up event meant to bring in a wider audience. While it's unlikely that Born Again will lead to similar revivals for Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, or Iron Fist — though perhaps some Punisher-like one-shots aren't out of the question (let's get Heroes for Hire going!) — at least the show plans to finally pay off a return to form that fans have patiently been waiting to see for nearly a decade now. It's just a shame that it feels like these street-level superheroes seem doomed to incomplete stories. All we can do is hope that this vigilante reunion is better than the last. Daredevil: Born Again is available for streaming on Disney+.