When Disney+’s Echo comes out on January 9, 2024, it’ll have the label “Marvel Spotlight” attached to it. And this might be a breath of much-needed fresh air for people who haven’t liked the way Marvel Studios productions are going recently, with their convoluted storylines you need to have seen five TV shows and ten movies to properly follow.
Marvel Spotlight is all about stories that can be understood without doing any homework. Echo, for example, stars Alaqua Cox as the titular character, and she first appeared in the Disney+ show Hawkeye … but you don’t need to have seen Hawkeye to understand Echo. Likewise, Daredevil characters Matt Murdoch (Charlie Cox) and Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) will be in the show, but you don’t need to have seen any of the earlier Daredevil material either. The characters, so the plan goes, will speak for themselves without the need for any backstory.
Echo is set to be the first Spotlight feature, and then it’ll be followed by Wonder Man starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. After that, Daredevil (a reboot of the previous Netflix Daredevil show) will almost certainly be the third one, with D’Onofrio recently telling BroBible’s Post Credit Podcast that it “for sure” would get the Marvel Spotlight on release.
What has Marvel said about Marvel Spotlight?
When the new label was announced in 2023, alongside the debut of the first Echo episodes at the Choctaw Nation’s annual Powwow, Marvel Studios producer Brad Winderbaum said that Spotlight would be all about “street-level” and “grounded” stories.
Later, in January 2024, he spoke to ComicBook.com about the feature. He explained, “It’s kind of like the comics, in that there are certain stories that tie into the continuity and really play into the overall narrative, and there’s other ones that are more standalone and are character-driven like Echo is.”
The Marvel comics had their own Marvel Spotlight starting in 1971. Many popular Marvel characters got their start there, among them Ghost Rider and Werewolf by Night. (Werewolf by Night got his own Disney+ movie in 2022, under the label “Marvel Studios Special Presentation.”)
Winderbaum went on, “Really, what the Spotlight branding represents is an opportunity for people who are more casual fans who might not know what happened in the last Avengers movie to show up and kind of enjoy it on its own terms.”
Unfortunately, it might have been this lack of appeal to casual fans that helped sink The Marvels, the (actually not bad) MCU flop that came out in 2023. Director and co-writer Nia DaCosta told Games Radar before the movie debuted:
“We have Ms. Marvel, the TV show, Captain Marvel, WandaVision, and it was kind of a constant negotiation to figure out, ‘Okay, how much information do people need? It was a real trial and error.
We don’t want people to have to watch anything else but, of course, you also have to be honest and be like, ‘This is the [33rd] project in this universe. It’s sort of a sequel to five different things. So at a certain point, you have to just be like, ‘Okay, yeah, there are some things that we can’t get in here, but it’ll be fun.'”
It was a gamble that didn’t pay off in the end. Hopefully, Marvel Spotlight will be a gamble that does. But first, casual and super-fans alike need to know what it stands for.
(image: Disney+)
