Marvel Studios & Disney Do Not Care About ‘Echo’ Anymore?
Marvel Studios and Disney+ recently announced premiere dates for two upcoming Disney+ shows. The second season of Loki is set to premiere on October 6, while Echo will premiere on November 29. But there is one huge difference! Unlike Loki, which will have a regular release of one episode per week, all episodes of Echo will be immediately available on the premiere date. This isn’t the first time Disney+ releases a whole season at once, but it is the first time they do it on a Marvel series.
A streaming service known for releasing a whole season (or at least half of it) at once is usually Netflix, while other streaming services tend to release new episodes weekly. The reason for that is quite simple; waiting for new episodes ensures the audience will keep their subscription longer to follow all the episodes properly. Also, while waiting for new episodes every week can be frustrating, sometimes it’s better to wait than binge a whole season in one day and then, after some time, forget what you watched. So, this begs the question, do Marvel Studios and Disney even care about Echo if they’re ready to throw it out all at once?
How important ‘Echo’ is for the whole MCU?
The first season of Loki received mainly positive responses from the audience, and the second season is one of the most-anticipated MCU projects at the moment, particularly because the first season ended with creating the Multiverse, and this year’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania started building a stage for the next big cinematic event with Kang the Conqueror as the main villain. While Loki is undoubtedly important for the future MCU, we can’t help but wonder why Kevin Feige chose Echo, of all the other supporting characters, to give her a spin-off.
Maya Lopez, aka Echo, first appeared in the Hawkeye series. Played by Alaqua Cox, Echo was one of the antagonists. Her role in the series proved to be very important, not only because she sought revenge against Ronin for killing her father but also because her connection to Wilson Fisk ultimately brought Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin back to the MCU for the first time since the closure of Netflix’s Daredevil series.
But despite that, we would’ve never guessed that Marvel Studios is planning to give Echo a spin-off if it wasn’t officially announced even before Hawkeye premiered.
Even though the ending of Hawkeye has set up the events of the spin-off, there’s still a question of what makes Echo so worthy of a standalone adventure. In the source material, Echo is depicted as the adopted daughter of Kingpin and the supporting character of Daredevil.
Although Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio were announced to return in the Echo series, we know that they’re also set to return in Daredevil: Born Again, and it’s still unknown if Alaqua Cox will reprise her role in that series, although that would actually make plenty of sense. Echo’s story from Hawkeye could’ve been easily continued in Born Again, but Marvel Studios decided for another course. We can only wait for the premiere of the series to find out why.
Marvel Studios is reconsidering its release strategy, and Echo might be a victim of it!
There have been some rumors and reports that Marvel Studios is reconsidering its release strategy regarding TV shows because of the growing superhero fatigue. The studio provided no official statement, but considering we watched eight MCU shows on Disney+ since WandaVision premiered in 2021, and when you add all the movies to the mix, it’s a fact we’re getting more MCU content than ever, which proved to be a double-edged sword.
That feeling of anticipation and excitement for each upcoming project somehow vanished since we’ve started getting new MCU content almost every month, and now, Marvel Studios decided to wait for eight whole months for the next MCU series, Secret Invasion, even though it was initially announced to premiere in “early 2023.” Since Secret Invasion and the second season of Loki are generally more anticipated than Echo, the studio maybe thought it would be wiser to release all the Echo episodes at once and let the fans organize how they’re going to watch it.
Echo will consist of six episodes, so it would take a month and a half for the whole series to be released a regular way. This way, Disney+ will release the entire series in one day to free up some schedule for other MCU projects.
Iron Heart, a series that was supposed to premiere after Echo, was initially announced for “late 2023”, but now there’s no way it will premiere before 2024. Marvel Studios is tangled in that release schedule because Kevin Feige knows some projects need to be released before the next crossover event, and with the next Avengers movie coming in 2025, who knows how many more movies and TV shows will need to be squeezed in, but at the same time with enough time between each of them to build up the hype?
Created by Marion Dayre, all episodes of Echo will be released on November 29, 2023.
