The rumors have been floating around for years, and now it's apparently official: Fox is rebooting Daredevil, just 7 years after trying to start the franchise with a film starring Ben Affleck. Deadline Hollywood reports that Fox has hired David Scarpa, who ruined another perfectly good existing property by writing 2008's The Day the Earth Stood Still, to write the screenplay.

Of course, Fox needs to greenlight a new Daredevil movie once in a while because Disney gets the rights otherwise, so it's entirely possible this is just a ploy to keep the Daredevil name in house with actually no intention of making the film. But as we saw with Sony last month, it's apparently conceivable to reboot a franchise that isn't even a decade old-- and that was a successful franchise. Not many people outside of comic book fanatics even remember that there as a Daredevil movie, and even fewer will remember a few years down the road, when the glut of Marvel superheroes is even greater.

So now... sigh... we begin the process of speculating about who will direct and who will star-- you can just look up every article we've written about Captain America over the last year or so, replace his name with Daredevil's, and have the process down pat. I have no investment in the Daredevil character, so I admit I'm more jaded about this than the true fans might be. And at this point I should have expected it. That doesn't make this constant reboot-reuse-recycle any less depressing, though.