Ben Affleck’s Daredevil Director Admits Film Was Over-Stuffed: ‘I Wanted Everything to Be in There’

Ben Affleck’s rendition of the Man Without Fear turned 20 on Valentine’s Day of this year, and to celebrate, Yahoo Entertainment sat down with Mark Steven Johnson, the director of the often-mocked superhero movie. The film, which saw Affleck’s Daredevil fight alongside Jennifer Garner’s Elektra, has become a sort of a relic of the early 2000’s thanks to its star-studded cast, campy feel and lackluster critical response. Now that time has revealed the true legacy of 2003’s Daredevil, Johnson admits he messed up a couple things.

“Looking back on it, one of the mistakes I made with the film was wanting to put everything in!” Johnson said. “I wanted to do Daredevil’s origin story, and I wanted to do the Elektra Saga and I wanted to introduce Bullseye and Foggy. I wanted everything to be in there, but the film could only support so much. And then when you’re told to cut a half-hour out and and make it more of a love story, things start to feel rushed and not quite right. It’s a fan thing: when you love something so much, you want to tell it all.”

Daredevil follows Affleck and Garner as they take on Kingpin, an underworld figure who controls organized crime in New York City. As Daredevil takes on Kingpin, he is met with resistance from the likes of an extremely skilled hitman named Bullseye, played by none other than Colin Farrell. However, according to Johnson, the heart of the movie wasn’t in its seedy underworld plot; it was in the love story.

“The love story became the primary story,” Johnson said.

Daredevil: the perfect movie for a Valentine’s Day date!

Alongside Affleck, Garner and Farrell, the film also stars Jon Favreau as Foggy Nelson, Joe Pantoliano as Ben Urich and David Keith as Jack Murdock, Matt Murdock’s deceased father. Kingpin is played by Michael Clarke Duncan, a decision that Johnson revealed caused a lot of backlash at the time. In the comic books, the villain is a white man, but Johnson simply felt Duncan was the best actor for the job.

“Oh yeah, I got a lot of blowback,” the director said. “It’s the strangest Catch-22, because you want to have opportunities for everybody. You say, ‘I’m not going to pay attention to race: I’m just going to cast the right person for the role.’ But then you get killed for that [from some fans] who say: ‘The Kingpin should be white’ or ‘He’s not my Kingpin’ and all that kind of stuff. So I definitely got heat on that, but I don’t regret the decision at all. Michael was fantastic. It’s hard to find a guy who is that big and also that formidable, and Michael was definitely that guy. God bless him.”

Despite the negative reviews, the film from 20th Century Fox still did very well at the box office. It brought in $179 million, inspiring Fox to greenlight Garner’s 2005 spinoff movie Elektra. Because of that film’s lackluster performance at the box office, Affleck’s Daredevil universe came to a close.

Now, Charlie Cox plays Matt Murdock in the MCU; the character was seen briefly in both Spider-Man: No Way Home and She-Hulk. He will reprise his role alongside Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin in the upcoming Disney+ series Daredevil: Born Again.

Carson Burton is a freelance news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter at @carsonsburton.