As much as Echo is guaranteed to make history for a number of reasons when it finally premieres in January of next year, can anyone really buy into the hype that it marks “a new direction” for the Marvel Cinematic Universe?
After all, we’ve been down this road many times before, with virtually every new film or television project to roll off the production line touting itself as the evolution of the franchise’s standard formula, only for far too many of them to fall into the familiar trappings that have defined the MCU’s output for the last decade and a half.
With that in mind, studio executive Brad Winderbaum touting Echo as “kind of a new direction for the brand, especially on Disney Plus” is worth taking with a grain of salt, even if its status as the first TV-MA series is beyond doubt. The trailer promised crunching fights, bruising battles, and jarring violence, but channeling Netflix’s Daredevil a little too much could potentially prove to be detrimental in the long run.
After all, Born Again was torn down and rebuilt because it deviated too much from a successful template and was deemed to be suffering as a result, and there’s only so many times you can hear the same faces employed by Marvel trotting out variations on the “you’ve never seen the MCU like this before” line without proving it before weariness begins to set in.
Echo definitely has the potential to stand out from the pack, and after a lackluster Multiverse Saga so far, let’s hope that it does.