Marvel Studios reaffirms commitment to evil bald guys by confirming Kingpin is the MCU's "street-level Thanos"

Marvel Studios executive producer Brad Winderbaum has essentially confirmed Wilson Fisk aka Kingpin will have a huge role in the street-level corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe moving forward.

One of the biggest recent surprises in the increasingly disenchanting MCU was the return of Vincent D'Onofrio as Wilson Fisk in the 2021 Disney Plus series Hawkeye after a memorable run as the Kingpin in Netflix's Daredevil series. The titular hero of that show also returned via Spider-Man: No Way Home and two episodes of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, and both characters will clash once again in the semi-rebooted Daredevil: Born Again series. But before that, Fisk is a crucial part of Echo, the five-episode show (also born from Hawkeye) arriving next week.

With the street level of the MCU rapidly heating up and the tone of some upcoming projects going straight-up TV-MA and R-rated, fans have many questions concerning Echo, the new Daredevil show, and everything connected to this new chunk of Marvel Studios productions. During a recent interview with executive producer Brad Winderbaum, Screen Rant's Joe Deckelmeier asked the right questions and pressed the Marvel producer to admit that Wilson Fisk is the big bad not only for Echo and Daredevil, but also for anyone set to become part of that corner of the MCU in the near future:

"As a chapter in Wilson Fisk's life, this is a crucial one and sets the stage in some remarkable ways for what's coming next." This might even include Tom Holland's Spider-Man after he took on a more 'friendly neighborhood' superhero role at the end of No Way Home.

As teased by the first trailer, Daredevil also shows up in this show ahead of his own new chapter, as he has strong ties to both Fisk and Maya López aka Echo. The question of whether the Netflix Daredevil series is part or not of the Sacred Timeline (the MCU's main continuity instead of an alternate one within the larger multiverse) was also brought up.

Winderbaum himself sees enough DNA of that first live-action exploration of Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk on TV in the new iterations to consider it part of the main MCU canon even though at some point that series started ignoring the larger MCU events: "It was another part of the company developing the Netflix stuff. We were aware of what they were doing... Now that we've see how well-integrated the stories are, I think that I personally... would be confident in saying it's part of the Sacred Timeline."

This would contradict what a recent official MCU book says (or doesn't say) and make us wonder where the hell Deborah Ann Woll's Karen Page and Elden Henson's Foggy Nelson are in the upcoming Daredevil series, especially when everything was pointing towards Vincent D'Onofrio and Charlie Cox playing variants of their original characters. In the grand scheme of things, however, it doesn't really matter. We're just happy to have them back.