If Rosario Dawson’s Comments About ‘The Punisher’ Return Are True, We Have Some Hopes for the MCU

Twitter exploded the minute that Rosario Dawson took to the stage at C2E2 and seemingly confirmed that The Punisher was coming back with Jon Bernthal. The video has Dawson on stage talking about Claire Temple (who Dawson played in the Netflix Marvel shows and appeared throughout all of them with the exception of The Punisher, from Daredevil through The Defenders) and saying that she’d be excited to have the chance to finally knock The Punisher off her list.

“I found out yesterday that The Punisher is happening again,” Dawson said in the video, and while we’ve had a lot of new information coming our way from the Netflix MCU side of things, that has not been one of them.

She’s since tweeted that she got the intel from a signing where a fan must have said to her that it was coming back, and in her excitement, she just ran with it instead of double-checking that the information was correct.

So the important part being that she said “Confirmation is key,” but it also isn’t exactly a wild thought that The Punisher is coming back, and this could easily just be a bit of cover for an accidental early announcement. My current working theory is that they’re slowly reintroducing the characters in nearly the same order we met them in on Netflix.

Where to take the Netflix shows

We have seen Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) and Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) both make their reappearances in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Hawkeye and Spider-Man: No Way Home, and it’s been announced that they’ll show up in Echo (with Matt making an appearance in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law and his own show, Daredevil: Born Again, as well as having Cox voice the character in the new Spider-Man: Freshman Year animated series). But where does that leave the rest of the Defenders?

Well, we’ve seen stars Krysten Ritter and Mike Coulter hanging out with each other again, and there have been rumors that Ritter’s Jessica Jones will show up in Echo, and so we could potentially see start to show up in the same order we met the team. Sure, Fisk appearing first does pose a slight change in the lineup, but having Matt Murdock appear and then Jessica Jones, and then Luke Cage, and working our way to Jon Bernthal’s Frank Castle would make the most sense.

That’s especially if we are supposed to be seeing these other heroes coming into the fold. Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige recently said that his “on the street” side of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is going to be the Matt Murdock and Peter Parker side of things, and if that’s the case, it’d be fun to see the rest of the Defenders show up in that space.

Until we know more, we can pretend like there’s some truth in Dawson’s slip up, if only to give us hope for the rest of the Defenders because let’s be honest, we miss the Netflix shows and the team we briefly had there.

(featured image: Marvel Entertainment)