The ‘Daredevil’ Defenders MCU Canon Debate Is Over

For an incredibly long time now, there have been debates about whether or not Marvel’s Netflix offerings, the Defenders series of shows, are canon within the MCU. When they aired, though they made extremely passing references to the events of the films, they never actually crossed over, and a supposed rift between Marvel TV and film had many thinking that they were not part of official MCU canon.

I’ve been hearing this for years now, but at this point, the debate is over. It’s not just that Disney Plus has now adopted Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, Luke Cage and The Punisher into its catalogue, it’s that these characters are starting to appear in official MCU properties. And to combat another common argument about canon, these are indeed the same versions of these characters. They are not alt-universe reboots played by the same actors, erasing their history before.

We have heard this out of Wilson Fisk’s own mouth, as actor Vincent D’Onofrio said that yes, this was the same version of Kingpin from Daredevil that showed up in Hawkeye. But it’s not just him and it’s not just his own head canon.

On Marvel.com, where I’m not sure how you get more official than that, they have an elaborately written character section for pretty much every MCU character. If you go there, for both Kingpin and Matt Murdock, they have their entire bio from their time on the Netflix show, and they continue on by including their new outings in Hawkeye and Spider-Man: No Way Home as part of the same timeline.

These are the same characters.

The former Netflix shows are canon in the MCU.

The characters are not rebooted alternate universe versions of themselves. They retain all their storylines and memories and events from their old series.

The end.

Now, I am somewhat less sure about Agents of SHIELD, or at least its later seasons. The ABC show which also recently left Netflix for Disney Plus was more directly tied into the MCU in its early seasons, but the long the show went on, the more it became free to do its own thing. SHIELD had global scale events like the awakening of Inhumans across the entire planet, which is something we never saw happen in the MCU, and it never dealt with the effects of the Thanos snap.

But SHIELD also veered into time travel pretty heavily, so you could argue that eventually it branched into an alternate timeline or a multiverse type situation, so it’s possible that those characters could still re-enter the MCU at some point. I know everyone is kind of dying to see Quake return in particular in some corner of the MCU. But “is everything canon in Agents of SHIELD?” is a more complicated question than with the Defenders Netflix series, I’d argue, and is probably a debate for another day.

But yes, the Defenders are canon. Expect to see a lot more of them in the future.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.