What cinematic universe? Echo is the first MCU show with the “Marvel Spotlight” label

Last week, Marvel Studios dropped a trailer for Echo, an upcoming Disney+ show all about Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox), a deaf superhero who originally worked as an enforcer for the Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio), as we saw in the Disney+ show Hawkeye. Both Cox and D’Onofrio  will be back for Echo, which is coming in January.

The show looks pretty good, but it’s no secret that Marvel is in something of a slump lately. Movies like Eternals and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania have underperformed and shows like Secret Invasion have been met with eye rolls and grimaces pretty much across the board. Even Disney CEO Bob Iger has admitted that releasing too many Marvel content has “diluted focus and attention,” especially when you need to watch all of it to understand what happens next.

With Echo, Marvel is trying to ease off that last bit, and signal that you can enjoy this show even if you haven’t watched the other 30 squillion movies and TV shows in the MCU. Marvel revealed as much on its website: Echo will be the first MCU show to released under the “Marvel Spotlight” banner.

What is the Marvel Spotlight banner?

Head of Streaming Brad Winderbaum broke down this idea. “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,” he said. “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.”

As Winderbaum suggests, Marvel has been using the Spotlight banner in comics for a long time. The issue was that the comics eventually became too entangled and complicated to reasonably expect people to keep up with everything, so the Spotlight banner let them know when something was a stand-alone story that could buy and enjoy before moving on with their lives. Now that the MCU has been around for well over a decade, it’s suffering from the same problem.

That said, we wonder if this was always Marvel’s plan, or if the Marvel Spotlight banner was something they decided to use after they realized that people were tiring of being required to watch so many movies and TV shows. Echo, after all, is literally a spinoff of Hawkeye. I imagine the show will go out of its way to lay the groundwork for new viewers, but if you haven’t watched Hawkeye, you won’t be getting the full and complete story.

In any case, all five episodes of Echo will drop on Disney+ on January 10.

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h/t The A.V. Club