Echo Trailer Isn’t Half Bad

Television

Marvel is ending 2023 with a whimper, but it’s looking to start 2024 off with a bang (albeit a subdued one). Today, the studio released a trailer for Echo, the upcoming Disney+ series that is the tenth MCU TV show on the streaming service. (Dear Lord, there have been ten of these!) Echo is a spin-off of Hawkeye, starring Alaqua Cox as Maya Lopez, a deaf Native American assassin who returns to her hometown in Oklahoma to get in touch with her family and culture, but her criminal past follows her. Vincent D’Onofrio appears as Wilson Fisk, aka the Kingpin, with Graham Greene, Chaske Spencer, Tantoo Cardinal, and Cody Lightning  in supporting roles. Charlie Cox is expected to return as Daredevil. Echo will arrive on Disney+ and Hulu in its entirety on January 10, 2024, and is the first of this new wave of Marvel shows to be rated TV-MA. You can see the trailer below:

Marvel’s post-Endgame troubles are all over this show. The Echo trailer isn’t bad at all; the action looks pretty good, the tone seems much more serious than the goofy jokefests these shows tend to devolve into, and D’Onofrio is always fun to watch as the Kingpin. Seeing Fisk beat the guy who was rude to Maya raises a lot of interesting possibilities about how he sees her; is she a surrogate daughter to him? What is it about her that gets his attention? The way he compares her to him at the end of the trailer, maybe he sees a bit of himself in her. The problem is that I don’t think anyone has faith in Marvel to follow through on this potential. The trailers for shows like Loki and Falcon and the Winter Solider looked cool, too, and the actual shows were… not. And after Hawkeye, I’m worried about what they’ll do to the Kingpin as he turns up more often; D’Onofrio’s version of the classic Marvel villain was outstanding on Daredevil, but Hawkeye put him in a Hawaiian shirt and had him get defeated by Kate Bishop and (seemingly) shot by Maya. It’s nice to see him wearing his traditional white suit and being a badass in the Echo trailer, but is the show going to maintain that feel or undermine him again? I don’t know, but Marvel dumping the entire thing at once – on two different streaming services – doesn’t instill a lot of confidence.