Echo is heading to Disney+ and is the first in the Marvel Spotlight banner. Meant to highlight specific characters outside of the larger story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it lets us spend time with characters we’ve come to know and love without connecting too much to the MCU as a whole.
What’s exciting about Echo is that we get to see Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox) at the forefront of her own show. It also gives us the chance to check in on some heroes we know and love, and in a new interview with director Sydney Freeland, she talked about getting to direct a fight between Maya and our beloved Daredevil himself, Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox)!
“It’s one shot, it’s six minutes long, and story dictates everything,” Freeland told TVInsider. “Maya Lopez [enters] that scene as a teenage girl, but she [leaves] as a cold-blooded killer. And it was important for me that the audience is able to see that transformation happen in real-time.” So we get to see Maya and Matt fight? Perfection. That’s exactly what many of us wanted out of (at least one moment of) Echo.
But Daredevil and Kingpin aren’t the only ones fans can expect to see. Freeland went on to tease some other cameos fans can get excited about. “There are a number of cameos in our series, and fans of the MCU will see characters from other films and shows that they recognize. But at the same time, you don’t have to have done your homework coming into this. People who aren’t familiar with the MCU can still come in and watch this.”
The more street-level heroes we get, the more we want crossovers between them.
It is exactly what we wanted out of the street level Marvel stories
The point of the Marvel Spotlight series is that we won’t have things like Echo directly connecting to stories in the future (so we won’t need to have seen Echo to watch things like the future Daredevil series) but that doesn’t mean we can’t expect to see Maya in other street-level shows or vice versa. It is what made this such an exciting addition to the Marvel canon in the first place, outside of giving Maya her own show and the representation of having a Native hero at the center of her own series.
Maya Lopez and Matt Murdock battling each other in a one shot, à la the style that we’ve come to know and love from Daredevil when it was on Netflix? That sounds like perfection and exactly what we’ve been missing for the characters we’ve come to love throughout the years, Maya being a part of that world is amazing. Echo is her show, and we can’t wait to see who she meets along the way, and how her past with Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio) will play a part in her story.
Echo will premiere on Disney+ on January 9, and we cannot wait!
(featured image: Disney+)
