Marvel’s “Echo” Drops Two New Looks as Series Arrives on Disney+

January 9, 2024

Marvel Studios’ Echo is officially reverberating across Disney+. The new series is now streaming, in its entirety, on Disney+, with two new looks at the series available for your viewing pleasure. The first is a clip from the series, which shows Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox) unleashing her hand-to-hand combat skills on a roomful of men who can do little about it. The second is a refresher on the series’ main villain and one of the longstanding Marvel baddies of them all, Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio). The bruising behemoth has been a part of Maya’s life from the time she was a little girl, and their relationship will be a major through-line in the upcoming series.

Echo is directly connected to Marvel’s previous series, with Maya Lopez playing an ostensible villain in Hawkeye, which was centered on Jeremy Renner’s ace sharpshooter and his protegé, Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld). Yet Echo also represents a new approach to how Marvel will handle some of their upcoming series. Echo follows Maya, who is Native American and hearing impaired, after the events in Hawkeye and centers her reconnection to her Native American roots as she tries to chart a new path forward. It will be a dark path, as is evident in the first trailer, one that has been shaped from the time she was a little girl by the aforementioned Kingpin or Wilson Fisk if you want to use his civilian name. Kingpin was first introduced on-screen way back in Netflix’s Daredevil series, which was centered on Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock/Daredevil, who will also be appearing in Echo.

Yet there’s something that will make Echo stand apart from all the Marvel shows that have bowed on Disney+ thus far—it will be the first series to fall under Marvel’s new Spotlight Banner, which won’t require viewers to possess previous MCU knowledge and which will be darker and grittier in tone and substance than previous Disney+ series. They will, in fact, be more in line with Marvel’s previous TV era on Netflix, specifically Daredevil and The Punisher, and will be geared directly towards a TV-MA audience.

Marvel Studios’ head of streaming, television, and animation, Brad Winderbaum, explained the approach on Marvel.com:

“Marvel Spotlight gives us a platform to bring more grounded, character-driven stories to the screen, and in the case of Echo, focusing on street-level stakes over larger MCU continuity. Just like comics fans didn’t need to read Avengers or Fantastic Four to enjoy a Ghost Rider Spotlight comic, our audience doesn’t need to have seen other Marvel series to understand what’s happening in Maya’s story.”

At a press screening of scenes from Echo, series director Sydney Freeland said that viewers can expect a very different tone, considering that, unlike previous Marvel TV installments on Disney+, Echo follows an ostensible villain.

“People on our show — they bleed. They die,” Freeland said. “They get killed, and there are real-world consequences.”

Check out the new teasers below. Echo is now streaming on Disney+.