It’s no secret that Vincent D’Onofrio has a great deal of affection for his version of Wilson Fisk, the Marvel villain known as the Kingpin. D’Onofrio has now been playing his take on the businessman/crime boss/politician for almost exactly a decade at this point, off and on, and unlike, say, his similar-length stint in the Law & Order mines, he still speaks pretty glowingly of stepping into Fisk’s immaculately cobbled shoes. Which is why it’s interesting to hear from D’Onofrio that we’re probably never going to see this version of Fisk appear in a Marvel film.
This is per a recent episode of Happy Sad Confused, in which Josh Horowitz affably grilled D’Onofrio about his career, and where Fisk might go in the future. Which, turns out, is pretty much definitely not going to be to the movies; not because D’Onofrio wouldn’t, but because Marvel apparently can’t. “I’m only usable for television series,” D’Onofrio explained. “It’s a very hard thing for Marvel to use my character, because of ownership.”
D’Onofrio doesn’t go into specifics of what the exact rights issue affecting Fisk are, but it’s pretty clearly rooted in the ongoing tangle of ownership with Sony over those Marvel characters Disney still doesn’t possess full rights to. The two companies have done a frankly remarkable job of playing nice with each other when it comes to Kingpin’s familiar foe Spider-Man over the last few years, but Fisk is in a strange situation because (per the terms of a deal from back in 2011) both studios basically share custody of him. (As opposed to Daredevil himself, whose rights were owned by Fox, and either reverted to Disney at some point, or got schlorped up when the company acquired Fox back in 2019, which is presumably why Charlie Cox popped up playing him in Spider-Man: No Way Home.) That apparently makes using the character, who last appeared as a villain, voiced by Liev Schrieber, in the animated Into The Spider-Verse in 2018, very tricky to use for films. Disney’s been so diligent about building back up its roster of characters after Marvel sold off the film rights to huge parts of its stable in the early days of the superhero movie boom that it’s kind of weird to see them run into an issue like this in 2025, but that’s how it goes for the vaguely Spidey-adjacent.
Anyway, it’s not like D’Onofrio’s not keeping busy: He’s got another season of Born Again to make, and is actually set to co-star with Schrieber in Darren Aronofsky’s next film, Caught Stealing.
[via TV Line]
