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Daredevil: Born Again's Wilson Fisk will never appear in an MCU film, says Kingpin actor Vincent D'Onofrio
Wilson Fisk may have been all over the MCU's TV projects - Daredevil, Hawkeye, and Echo come to mind - but if what D'Onofrio says is true, he'll never get the big screen treatment like Matt Murdock

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Sorry Frank Sinatra, just because you "made it there," doesn't mean you can "make it anywhere." Case in point: Wilson Fisk. After his villainous turn in the original Daredevil became one of the most lauded in the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Fisk appeared in Hawkeye, then Echo, and now is back in Disney+'s Daredevil: Born Again, in which the character has become Mayor of NYC. Despite all that success in the City that Never Sleeps, however, we're never going to see our favorite Kingpin of Crime on the big screen.
That is, if you believe what the actor that plays him has to say.
The story comes a recent visit that actor Vincent D'Onofrio made to the Happy Sad Confused podcast. Speaking to host Josh Horowitz, D'Onofrio (who has played Kingpin ever since the character was introduced to the MCU) gave a disheartening update on anyone hoping to see a cinematic turn for Wilson Fisk.
"It’s a very hard thing to do," D'Onofrio said, "for Marvel to use my character. It’s a very hard thing to do, because of ownership and stuff. [...] Right now, I’m only usable for television series. Different kinds of series, whatever it is, but not even a one-off Fisk movie [is possible] or anything like that. It’s all caught up in rights and stuff. I don't know when [Fisk on the big screen] work out, or if it would ever work out at all, really."
Let's be entirely clear here - D'Onofrio doesn't get into the specifics of why Wilson Fisk won't appear in an MCU movie, beyond citing "rights and stuff." However, it doesn't take much more than a casual Spider-Man fan to wonder if this tricky situation comes down to the fact that, in many Marvel Comics, the Kingpin is an adversary of Spider-Man. In that case, Sony could claim the rights to the film version of the character, since they still own that privilege for "Spider-Man characters." Lending credence to this theory is that an animated Kingpin, voiced by Liev Schreiber, was the central villain of Sony's 2018 Into the Spider-Verse movie.
Whatever the reason for Fisk's absence from future MCU movies may be, we can rest assured that the rest of the Daredevil: Born Again crew are still very much in the running. After all, we all saw Matt Murdock lawyering for Peter Parker in Spider-Man: No Way Home, right? That makes it seem like even more Daredevil-adjacent characters may possibly work themselves into movies one day, even if the biggest bad among them doesn't get to take the journey with them.
But hey, as Ol' Blue Eyes himself might say... That's life.
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
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