Joe Carnahan's pitch for DAREDEVIL rejected by Fox

If you ask me, the perfect way to adapt the Marvel superhero into a movie adaptation would be to set it in a gritty 70's atmosphere, reminiscent of films like Serpico and Taxi Driver. This is what director Joe Carnahan seemed to aim for in his pitch for a DAREDEVIL reboot, and he prepared a video presentation for it as well, a "Sizzle Reel" actually (spliced together pieces of film stock, bits of soundtrack, some concept art and, in this case, comic book panels that are meant to give the viewer a sense of tone and theme). Unfortunately, the people at Fox turned it down. [read more & check out the sizzle reel after the jump]

If Fox does not start production on a Daredevil movie by October 10, the rights for the character will revert to Marvel Studios. Fox is actually lukewarm on rebooting Daredevil.

Daredevil is what could come close to what a Marvel version of Christopher Nolan's Batman would look like, in my opinion. The superpower element is almost absolutely absent in most Daredevil stories. Its storylines revolve more around the criminal underworld and gangland tales. Daredevil's "power" is nothing more than the extremely heightened senses that this blind vigilante has, and if you count movies like Blind Fury and Zatoichi, and if not for the fact that he wears a costume, you can argue that Daredevil cannot be considered a "superhero"

Joe Carnahan has proven that he is such a great action director with his work on The GREY and the 2010 adaptation of The A-TEAM, and he has actually gained my respect for showing us (with the use of this video presentation) that his vision for a Daredevil movie is pretty much on the spot super-ideal for what a Daredevil movie could look like.

In a recent interview, Carnahan shared inside story of how it all happened...

I was brought in pretty late in the game, and my take probably didn’t help matters since they had an existing script.  But I just thought that if you were going to do it, this was the way to go.  This is the way that intrigued me… It was initially something I passed on because Christopher Nolan had done such a lovely job with Batman and unless you’re going to go after that trilogy, then that’s how you have to think.  You can’t out-hurdle that, then what’s the point of trying?  So it set the bar extraordinarily high, and I thought ‘Well, if we’re going to do this, let’s have a discussion about Hell’s Kitchen, and how it was really Hell’s Kitchen in the 70s,” so that got me really excited.  But as I mentioned, the clock ticking and this kind of October drop-dead date, it wasn’t tenable.  And having gone down this road in the past when you’re trying to write something and shoot it at the same time is disastrous, and I think you’d need an adequate amount of time to put that script together in the right way.  My brother [Matthew Michael Carnahan (The Kingdom)] was interested in writing it with me, so we’ll see.

He also mentioned about why he wanted his Daredevil movie to take place in the 1970s.

As I’m finishing my kind of re-imagining of Death Wish, I think the 70s is figuring into my conscious and subconscious mind right now.  I think it was the last time music and movies were just tremendous.  We just cranked out some great stuff.  I think that’s why the sizzle reel is able to be kind of abstract because people have such great fondness in their hearts for that decade, particularly the early part of that decade.  I’m excited; you know the idea of having Daredevil on top of a building somewhere with the Serpico marquee in the background was enough, that image was enough, for me to want to make the movie.

Watch Carnahan's DAREDEVIL sizzle reel...

Carnahan's next project is the remake of the DEATH WISH movie which put Charles Bronson on  the action movies map in the late 70s.

Fox, on the other hand, has over the years got an unhealthily fat and bad reputation of being "traditional" and "commercial" in whatever they do. One of the more prominent stories around Fox is that they were the ones who screwed Joss Whedon in his projects; ESPECIALLY in Whedon's cult hit series "Firefly" which Fox cancelled despite the growing fan base that it managed to generate. It's a good thing that Avengers movie was under Marvel and Disney studios; he might not have had that chance to create such hit.