Time & Perspective Quote by Avi Arad

Arad’s line lands with the breezy defensiveness of a pitch meeting trying to sound like a shrug. “As you know” is corporate throat-clearing: an attempt to recruit the listener into a shared reality where the next claim can’t be challenged. Then comes the real move: drawing a bright boundary around who counts as a legitimate knower. If you’re not “a comic book reader,” Daredevil is “not a known thing” - a phrase that turns cultural awareness into a market metric.

The intent is strategic, not descriptive. Arad is managing expectations around risk: Daredevil lacks the built-in, cross-generational familiarity of Spider-Man or Batman, so any adaptation needs to be framed as discovery rather than inevitability. He’s also implicitly justifying why a studio might alter tone, cast, mythology, even the title’s presentation: when the character isn’t “known,” fidelity becomes less a sacred duty and more a negotiable line item.

The subtext reveals an executive worldview where fandom is both valuable and containable. Comic readers are acknowledged, even flattered, but positioned as a niche - an early adopter segment - while the real prize is everyone else. It’s a neat inversion of how superhero culture now operates, where “unknown” can be an advantage: freedom from baggage, space to redefine, a chance to manufacture familiarity through film and TV.

Contextually, this is the era when Marvel’s screen future depended on converting deep-cut IP into mass recognition. Arad isn’t dismissing Daredevil; he’s pricing him.