Daredevil vs Punisher in DAREDEVIL Season 2

Spoilers for Daredevil Season 1 below!

With Vincent d’Onofrio’s Wilson Fisk behind bars at the end of Daredevil‘s first season, fans have been speculating furiously about the identity of season two’s Big Bad – would it be Bullseye, master assassin and main villain of the universally acclaimed Ben Affleck movie? Well, it seems as if the answer has been right in front of us the whole time. Well, for a few weeks anyway.

Nerdist have reported that the Big Bad for the majority of the season will actually be Frank Castle aka the Punisher, confirmed recently to be played by The Walking Dead‘s Jon Bernthal, with new showrunner Marco Ramirez referring to season two as ‘Daredevil vs the Punisher: Dawn of Justice’ (half of that is true). It’s easy to see why Matt Murdock and his no-kill rule might have an issue with this new vigilante, due to the Punisher’s reasonably psychotic crime-fighting methods  that generally involves pumping goons (who probably aren’t even evil, and only needed the money to pay for their sick child or something) full of hot lead. Yep, Frank Castle, despite his vaguely noble intentions, is a bit of a nutcase, so it’s a logical and intriguing storytelling choice to place the anti-hero in the main villain spot given his vastly different ethical code to Daredevil and should genuinely freshen up the formula.

However, for fans of Bullseye, there’s still hope, with Nerdist going on to speculate that the two vigilantes will eventually stop trying to beat the pulp out of each other and may team up against the true villain, Bullseye. That makes three pieces of superhero fiction next spring whereby two heroes have a scrap and then team up to defeat a bad guy, so 2016 is certain to be a hell of a year for fans of superheroes punching each other in the face. Batman v Superman, Captain America v Iron Man and now Daredevil v the Punisher. Not bad, huh?

Daredevil Season 2 will stream on Netflix in 2016.