"Daredevil" Does Valentine's Day

This, after 20th Century Fox officially set a February 14 opening for the latest Marvel Comics do-gooder to get the big-screen treatment.

Daredevil, starring Ben Affleck as the singularly named, sight-challenged superhero, tentatively had been looking at a January 17 debut. But today's Variety says the studio suits decided V-Day would provide optimal cash opportunities, seeing as how it's also the kick-off for the three-day President's Day weekend.

It's actually the second time the suits decided February 14 would be just the thing. (A V-Day opening also was talked this past January.) But in February, Fox deigned that Martin Luther King Day weekend 2003 would best suit its superhero flick, and it pushed up the release date to January 17.

Before, of course, pushing it back to February 14.

If all this scheduling and rescheduling is causing you cranium distress, imagine how Fox felt--up until several weeks ago it was flying as blind as Affleck's Matt Murdock (the legal-eagle secret identity of you-know-who).

Daredevil, costarring Michael Clarke Duncan and Colin Farrell as baddies, the Kingpin and Bullseye, respectively, and Alias' Jennifer Garner as the twisted-love interest, Elektra, only started shooting this past March. And then, of course, the real clincher: Spider-Man only opened a few weeks ago. How was Fox to know how movie audiences would take to these mostly untested Marvel heroes? Well, once Spidey grossed $285.6 million in its first three weekends, it got a pretty good idea.

"We are very excited about unveiling the next big Marvel superhero on the first big holiday of the year," Fox exec Bob Harper says in Variety.

Indeed, 2003 will be a banner--dare we say, Bruce Banner?--year for the Marvel faithful. Also due to hit theaters: Fox's X-Men sequel, X2 (set for May 2), and Universal's non-incredible (in title only, presumably) The Hulk (set for June 20).

Of these three flicks, Daredevil has had the lowest profile (until now, at least). X2, after all, is a pre-sold sequel to a blockbuster; Hulk is the much-anticipated followup to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for Oscar-winning director Ang Lee.

The X-Men and Hulk--the characters--are also veterans, in the Spidey tradition, of the multi-media circuit (old TV shows, lunch boxes, etc.) By contrast, Daredevil mostly has been confined to the comic stand, unless you count the time Rex (Street Hawk) Smith played him in the 1989 TV-movie, The Trial of the Incredible Hulk. (Which, in the name of a sweet and redeeming higher power, we won't.)

Fox began its mission toward recasting us a Daredevil nation last week, releasing the first publicity shots of Mr. Affleck in his little outfit. Sorry, crime-fighting apparatus.

The suit is a souped-up, body-sculpted version of the one worn by the skyscraper-swinging hero in the comics, which essentially is just a red unitard with a cowl.

In USA Today, writer/director Mark Steven Johnson (Simon Birch) says he knew he wasn't going to put Affleck in "red tights." "The struggle with the costume is staying faithful to the comic and at the same time not making it look ridiculous," Johnson tells the newspaper.

According to one biased set-side visitor, Affleck looks anything but ridiculous as the crusading superhero.

"He's nailing [Daredevil] like [Christopher] Reeve nailed Superman or [Michael] Keaton nailed Batman," Affleck's frequent director (and Daredevil comic scribe) Kevin Smith reports in a recent post on his Website.

Perhaps most promising of all for Daredevil fans, Smith, who says he's seen a "ton of footage," gushes that he hasn't "been this excited over a movie I'm not really involved with since Batman."