Sci-Fi Bulletin: Exploring the Universes of SF, Fantasy, Horror and Spy-fi!

Marvel TV’s Brad Winderbaum has been talking about plans for the future and they, along with the way Peacemaker’s second season ended, have got Alasdair Stuart thinking…

Here’s what Winderbaum had to say:

Daredevil: Born Again Season 2… “very much exists in the same world [as Spider-Man: Brand New Day], and it is important… We’re in a shared universe together. The Daredevil and Punisher comic books depict a certain tone and idea of New York in a different way than Spider-Man’s. But they both exist in the same universe: everything lines up and the impacts are felt, but we’re able to tell different stories.”

On the one hand, because we’ve been trapped in the multiverse for so many years now, this feels eye-roll worthy. Peter’s torturous path up through the MCU last left him isolated from everyone else and forced to work alone in a world that’s forgotten his identity. Having his first movie since then apparently feature Punisher, Hulk, possibly Daredevil and maybe even Yelena Belova feels a lot like serving someone some cake and telling them the cream is on another plate and will be out shortly. This news hitting the same month Peacemaker finished with a far more overt set up for Superman: Man of Tomorrow than expected just makes it all the more annoying. Doubly so when you remember that Thunderbolts*, a strong contender for the best MCU movie in years, was hobbled at the box office by the perception that it required too much ‘homework.’ Add in the endless rumours of Avengers: Doomsday being a mess, and the nagging sense of an incoming reboot and it all starts to feel like a chore.

Or does it?

Because the flip side to all this is the years of frustration at how little some of these stories have seemed to matter to one another. The DCEU’s biggest problem was the wild shifts in tone that took place between films that happened in the same world while the MCU’s biggest issue recently has been how disparate everything has felt. Or to put it another way, if Peter Parker is in New York in the MCU present day then he experienced the Void so it makes perfect sense for Yelena and he to have some emotional common ground. Doubly so for his choices to impact Daredevil given he’s a street level ‘vigilante’ and sure to directly impacted by both Fisk and Matt’s choices in Daredevil: Born Again. It’s not so much that there’s homework as there is context and that’s something that tends to make stories better, not worse.

What I’m saying is that perhaps this newfound closeness between properties isn’t all bad. That if we trust ourselves and trust the texts to tell us what we need, this could be a new golden age of superhero screen fiction. Perhaps we’ll get something with the Peacemaker characters before 2027 and perhaps Brand New Day is really bringing Peter back in from the cold. And, just maybe, finally making good on the idea that it really is all connected.

Peacemaker Season 2 is out now.

Daredevil: Born Again season 2 arrives March 2026

Spider-Man: Brand New Day releases 31st July 2026