From Glittering Vampires to a Blind Superhero -- 'Twilight' Director to Helm 'Daredevil' Reboot

Superhero movies continue to be big business at the box office, and aside from the Batman franchise it's the characters of Marvel Comics that have been dominating the screen. However, not all of them have hit a home run. 2003's "Daredevil," which starred Ben Affleck, managed to pull in just over $100 million, but compared to the previous year's "Spider-Man" it was a disappointment for Fox Studios.

There have been rumors and rumblings of the character getting a reboot for a few years, and now a director has been tapped to see it through. Variety has confirmed that David Slade, who most recently was the man behind the camera for "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse," will take over the franchise following the wrap of his current project.

The character of Matt Murdock, aka Daredevil, has always been fairly unique in that he is a physically disabled super hero. He was blinded as a young boy due to an accident involving dangerous chemicals. However, while he no longer can see, his remaining four senses are heightened to super-human levels. This allows him to use echo-location to determine his surroundings and an extreme sense of balance enables him to perform impressive acrobatics and combat moves. He's also been a character with a darker edge to him, somewhat more in the vein of Batman than most other Marvel superheroes. Daredevil struggles with issues of guilt and his Catholic upbringing, has had more than his share of tragic losses and can frequently be driven by revenge.

Fox's first attempt to bring Daredevil to the screen didn't ignore the darker sides of the character but didn't play them up very much either, at least not in the theatrically released version of the film. While it was not universally panned, the film met with very mixed reviews and its box office take was not what Fox had hoped for. The film actually holds up surprisingly well but suffers from trying to cover too many characters and story ideas for one movie.

The film contains Daredevil's origin, his long time feud with the Kingpin (played by Michael Clark Duncan), his meeting and falling in love with Elektra (Jennifer Garner), and his violent nemesis Bullseye (Colin Farrell.) It's simply too much for one film to handle properly. The film also suffered from a bit of backlash against its star, Ben Affleck. Affleck had become a staple of tabloids thanks to his relationship at the time with Jennifer Lopez, and the public seemed to be growing sick of him. This point would be driven home later that same year with the tanking of "Gigli," which starred both Affleck and Lopez. The final nail in the coffin for this original incarnation was probably the critical and commercial failure of the "Elektra" spin-off movie. That film was much more poorly reviewed and did not do well at the box-office.

Exactly what direction Fox and Slade will now take the franchise in still is not entirely clear. Most likely the film will distance itself from the original and not use any of the cast from the first effort. However, it's unlikely that the film will tackle the same story; the studio seems to want a "reboot" rather than a "remake."

That does leave an open question as to what story they might use, since the original covered nearly all of the most popular stories from the comics in its over-stuffed hour and 43 minutes. The character has gone to some dark and powerful places in the comics in the last few years. However, the strength of those stories largely depended on the history between the characters, something that is impossible to replicate in a reboot. Perhaps this is why Fox is currently labeling this new film as a "continuation" from the original rather than a reboot. This seems to indicate an approach similar to 2008's "The Incredible Hulk," which didn't reference the previous film featuring the character but also did little to outright contradict it either.

Whatever the story-line, work is expected to start up on the film as soon as Slade wraps his work on the Dracula film "The Last Voyage of the Demeter." It will have to be the director's next film because if Fox doesn't begin work on a new "Daredevil" property, the rights to the character will revert back to Marvel. For this same reason, there will probably be an announcement of a new "Fantastic Four" film of some kind within the next year or so. Fox is not about to let a potential franchise slip away, though it remains to be seen if they can do any better with it than they did the first time.