It’s been quite a long time coming, but fans of Jon Bernthal’s depiction of The Punisher have been rewarded generously in the last year for their patience. Debuting in the second season of Netflix’s original Daredevil series, the character got his own short-lived spin-off back in 2017 that lasted for two seasons, but after the cancellation of the Marvel-Netflix properties, he disappeared for six years before he and his brutal approach to problem-solving resurfaced in the first season of Daredevil: Born Again.
Now the character is set to appear in the upcoming Spider-Man: Brand New Day, showing up briefly in the trailer as a nuisance while Spider-Man intervenes in a high-speed chase. It’s unclear as of right now exactly how big his role will be, but one would have to imagine it’s significant enough for him to be absent from Daredevil: Born Again season 2. The ruthless vigilante won’t be entirely missing from the small screen this year however, as it was recently announced that the character will be leading his own streaming special titled The Punisher: One Last Kill, set to premiere one week after the season finale of Born Again.
While many people believed that Marvel Studios resurrecting Charlie Cox’s Daredevil would lead to the show and its interconnected properties making a big splash on the screen side of things, that hasn’t exactly been the case so far. Even though the first season of Daredevil: Born Again sees Wilson Fisk become mayor and introduce legislation against costumed vigilantes (a plot point lifted from Chip Zdarsky’s 2019 Daredevil run and the subsequent Devil’s Reign crossover event), it appears as if that won’t apply in Brand New Day, considering we see Spider-Man receiving a key to New York City in the trailer. What’s more is that the last we see of Frank Castle is him being imprisoned at the end of Born Again’s first season, although his final scene caps off with a clear implication of his escape.
There was a time when the film side of the MCU could get away with refusing to acknowledge the TV shows back when they were under the purview of Netflix, but now that they’re under the banner of Marvel Studios, there’s really no excuse.
With a massive plot hole now dangling over the franchise — what exactly happened to Fisk’s anti-vigilante legislation?) — it’s been left to The Punisher and this new special to clean up that continuity mess, alongside whatever other violent shenanigans Frank will get up to. Leaked set photos from the filming of the production last year revealed a dark-haired woman in a wheelchair, with fans immediately clocking her as potentially Isabella ‘Ma’ Gnucci, the savage matriarch of the Gnucci crime family with a vendetta against Frank for killing her two sons (and for leaving her to be mauled by polar bears from the Central Park Zoo).
While the character hasn’t appeared on-screen in any of Bernthal’s outings as The Punisher, Frank Castle has murdered quite a lot of people – they could tie the deaths of her sons to events from the Netflix series, or even connect her somehow to the victims of Frank’s attack on Wilson Fisk’s corrupt anti-vigilante task force from Born Again.
Depending on what happens in season 2, there’s also the possibility that Spidey’s warm welcome in NYC, Frank’s public reemergence, and the appearance of the Gnucci crime family could all be the result of fallout from the potential collapse of Fisk’s reign as mayor, with that position being filled by someone more sympathetic to the side of the vigilantes. As of right now, all fans have is rampant speculation, because it seems like these loose plot threads won’t officially connect together until One Last Kill is streaming
