One of Phase Four’s most slept-on projects had to have been Hawkeye, the Disney Plus miniseries that most prominently introduced Kate Bishop to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, complete with screen partner goals in Jeremy Renner’s Clint Barton and Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova.
Indeed, swapping out the flashy superpowers for a more grounded, street-level crime thriller was an intriguing change of pace from what we usually see out of the MCU, and as the franchise gets more adventurous with the spaces that it occupies, it will be interesting to see just how the formula evolves from here.
However it happens, we’re most likely going to be seeing the fruits of it in Echo, a spinoff of Hawkeye which will see Alaqua Cox reprise her role as the eponymous former commander of the Tracksuit Mafia, who returns to her Oklahoma hometown to reconnect with her Native American heritage through her community. With Charlie Cox’s Daredevil and Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin also among the cast, however, we don’t assume it’s going to be an entirely peaceful outing.
Peaceful or not, it’s apparently going to be a brand new shade of the MCU. In an interview with Collider, Echo producer Stephen Broussard teased a much more spiritual tone; one that could very well send the series to entirely uncharted waters as far as the MCU goes.
“It’s very different. Like, talking about Werewolf by Night to this. It’s a very different tonal sort of thing. I don’t want to say too much because there’s not a whole lot out there in the world, but it feels very grounded, it feels very spiritual in ways that feel fresh for us. Alaqua as the lead is incredibly compelling. I’m sort of hard-pressed to think of something that it feels like outside in the broader realm of the MCU, let alone within what we’ve done here. “
Cox shone alongside her fellow leading players back in Hawkeye, so we’re infinitely curious to see what she does with the majority of the spotlight. Combine that with this entirely different trajectory that Echo promises for the MCU, and it easily cements itself as a series to keep an ear out for.