Marvel Studios Releases 'Echo' Trailer, Revealing Hulu Stay

The first TV-MA MCU series since Netflix will premiere on January 10

Marvel Studios has released the trailer for Hawkeye spin-off series Echo, starring Alaqua Cox. It will be the first MCU series of the new year, premiering on January 10, 2024 on Disney+…and Hulu. It came 15 hours after currently-running MCU series Loki released its penultimate episode of its second season on the former.

This confirms the date given registered at the United States Copyright Office, which makes sense as it being so close it would likely be much more rigid, while at this point the more delayed stuff would be using it as a new target rather than the date. The Echo trailer comes just under four weeks before the series’s originally announced premiere date of November 29, before it was delayed in September.

Starring Alaqua Cox as Echo aka Maya Lopez, becoming the company’s first Native American and deaf lead, it also brings Marvel Studios’s first TV-MA rating and simultaneous Hulu release. And yeah, there is a Hulu release. However, the availability on that sibling streamer will only last until April 9. All episodes are still releasing at once so it’s not as if episode 6 will have five less weeks or episode 8 having 7 less on Hulu before it leaves.

Talking about the TV-MA rating at a press screening event, director and executive producer Sydney Freeland told reporters that she and the creative team wanted to “lean into” Maya’s villainess. “We wanted very, very adamantly to show that people on our show, they bleed, they die, they get killed, and there are real consequences,” adding that previous Marvel series like Daredevil, where two returning characters, Vincent D’Onofrio’s Wilson Fisk aka Kingpin and Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock aka Daredevil originate, and Punisher were inspiration in the storytelling and visuals. Additional comparisons have also been made to Breaking Bad and John Wick. Freeland also told that despite Lopez’s comic powers being the basis for the name Echo, she won’t have those powers in this iteration: “Her power in the comic books is that she can copy anything, any movement, any whatever. It’s kind of lame,” Freeland said. “I will say, that is not her power. I’ll just kind of leave it at that.”

The trailer sees Kingpin taking Maya in at a young age after her parents died in a crash and explores all the violent hardships and dealings she’s gone through. Gritty and grounded is just the least of it. Though apparently the confrontation it all boiled up to in Hawkeye just shot out his eye? Probably just a scratch to him. Maya faces her past, reconnects with her Native American roots and embraces the meaning of family and community. That is if she ever hopes to move forward while balancing aspirations tied to a life of crime as successor to Kingpin’s brutal legacy.

While Marvel series are probably best known from Disney+, Netflix, and ABC, the company has had something of a history with Hulu. Whether it’s in-season rights for ABC shows including Agents of SHIELD and Agent Carter, or having Fox-owned shows like The Gifted and Legion in its library, there’s also the collapsed The Offenders family of shows that only MODOK and Hit Monkey survived but disconnected. And the live action Helstrom series. The last new vestiges of Marvel Television before it folded. Since then, Secret Invasion’s first two episodes spent July 21 to August 17 there, and Werewolf by Night just spent half of September and all of October there for Halloween.

Echo also stars Chaske Spencer, Graham Greene, Tantoo Cardinal, Devery Jacobs, Zahn McClarnon, and Cody Lightning. Its episodes are directed by (tribes in parentheses): Sydney Freeland (Navajo) and Catriona McKenzie (Gunaikurnai). The series’s executive producers are Kevin Feige, Stephen Broussard, Louis D’Esposito, Brad Winderbaum, Victoria Alonso, Richie Palmer, Jason Gavin (Blackfeet), Marion Dayre and Sydney Freeland with co-executive producers Jennifer L. Booth and Amy Rardin. Its release will overlap with that of the second season of What If…? if it’s still in progress.

Source: Deadline