Marvel just gave 48 minutes of unfiltered violence to its most extreme character and you can watch it today on Disney+

Frank Castle, better known as the Punisher (or The Punisher if you’re an old-school comic reader), hasn’t had his own series for seven years. Since Netflix canceled ‘The Punisher’ in 2019, the character has survived on the margins of the MCU until ‘Daredevil: Born Again’ rescued him in 2025. Now Marvel has opted for a different format with him in ‘The Punisher: One Last Kill’. It is not a series or a movie, but 48 minutes of a borderline antihero, co-directed by Jon Bernthal himself and with a level of violence that Disney+ never allowed before.

‘The Punisher: One Last Kill’ comes with the “Marvel Television Special Presentation” label, a format that the studio premiered in October 2022 with ‘The curse of the werewolf‘. The format is a kind of laboratory: projects of between 45 and 60 minutes that function as self-contained stories without the pressure of sustaining a series for several weeks. Both ‘The Curse of the Werewolf’ and the Guardians of the Galaxy Christmas special worked as cult pieces, and with Punisher, Marvel has taken the experiment to the extreme, because its adult rating is the first on the platform for a Marvel Studios project.

Here we will see how an unexpected force drags Frank Castle back into battle. The Punisher believes he has eliminated the Gnucci crime family, the last link to his family’s murderers, and the surviving matriarch, Ma Gnucci, comes to him not to negotiate but to settle scores. The first half of the episode focuses on visions that haunt Castle; the second is a real-time action sequence inside an apartment building reminiscent of ‘The Raid’.

The idea for the series arose during the filming of the first season of ‘Daredevil: Born Again’. Bernthal asked the director for permission to develop something centered on Frank Castle. The two had previously collaborated, and that gave Disney confidence to have Bernthal co-write the script and serve as executive producer. Shot on real locations in Queens and Brooklyn, the photography is by Robert Elswit (Oscar winner for ‘Wells of Ambition’), a firm that visually elevates this bet far above a typical television film.

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