Popverse's top stories of the day

• Matthew Lillard continues to be genre cinema's busiest man, adding a Marvel deal thanks to Daredevil: Born Again
• WATCH:  Lore Corner: All you need to know about Matt Murdock before Daredevil: Born Again hits Disney+
• MEMBERS ONLY:  Popverse Jump: The My Dress-Up Darling manga is ending in March 21 and leaving all its dangling plot threads untrimmed

As if the trailers and various amounts of promotion for the show haven’t made it clear yet, Marvel Studios’ Daredevil: Born Again isn’t a remake or do-over of the Netflix series that brought the world Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock and Vincent D’Onofrio’s Wilson Fisk, but an evolution — one that, to hear it told by showrunner Dario Scardapane, was absolutely necessary for the series to work.

“The battle of Kingpin and Daredevil had become static,” the writer told Empire magazine. “If you look at how it ends almost every season [of the Netflix series], they punch the shit out of each other, Kingpin goes to jail, we know he’s gonna come back. I didn’t want to do that.”

Instead, he says, Born Again will switch things up — something that will be immediately apparent from the very first episode of the series. “The dynamic is way more tense [on the new show],” Scardapane continued. “There’s one scene between them in the first episode that lays it all out. Then we spend the next eight episodes throwing rocks at it.”

What we’re hearing is that the first episode of Daredevil: Born Again is quite literally a 'can’t miss,' and probably key to the rest of the series. It also suggests that whatever truce Matt and Wilson set out in the first episode is going to survive the first season, albeit in a somewhat bruised and battered form; after all, something needs to set up the stakes for the second season, right?

Although, let’s be honest: it’s not as if anyone was planning on skipping an episode as soon as the show drops on Disney+ March 4. Keep your eyes on Popverse for a lot more Daredevil: Born Again in the coming weeks.

Fear not, we have the essentials when it comes to Marvel's Daredevil - especially with Marvel Studios' Daredevil: Born Again. Check out:

• The key difference between Netflix's Daredevil and Marvel Studios' Daredevil: Born Again, according to the showrunner
• The best Daredevil stories of all time
• What to watch before Daredevil: Born Again 
• Popverse Picks: Our favorite things for Marvel's Man Without Fear including Ann Nocenti comics, the Netflix series, and more
• How Vincent D'Onofrio reinvented Daredevil's Kingpin
• Marvel's Daredevil actors, ranked from Charlie Cox to Ben Affleck and even Rex Smith
• How Frank Miller accidentally killed a Daredevil cartoon (and Marvel killed a book to avoid pissing him off)
• That time we caught Daredevil actor Charlie Cox sneaking into New York Comic Con as Bluey