‘Echo’ beats ‘Deadpool 3’ to the punch as Marvel’s first mature-rated project under Disney

It’s fair to say that the hype for Marvel’s latest Disney Plus series, Echo, has been as quiet as a whisper, but a TV-MA rating alongside the first official trailer has nipped that apathy in the bud real quick.

Before now, Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman’s team-up in Deadpool 3 was supposed to be the MCU’s first rated-R project, but given that TV-MA is the television equivalent of an R-rating, Maya Lopez’s (Alaqua Cox) first solo outing in Echo has punched through those barriers faster than Wade Wilson could deliver a snarky quip. We can practically see Wade’s incredulous face now.

Marvel dropped the official trailer for the series Friday morning alongside the addendum “Set your Disney+ profile to TV-MA to stream,” a foreign sentence by any standard for regular MCU fans. About 20 seconds in, Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) delivers a series of brutal and bloody punches in an alleyway to an ice cream man who moments earlier discriminated against a young Maya Lopez for being deaf. Each punch gets more bloody, as does the remainder of the trailer. 

Perhaps the most jarring evidence of maturity comes a little over a minute in, when a guard in a bulletproof vest whips out a gun and shoots the man in front of him in the neck, spewing blood and sending him flying backward. The moment was not lost on fans. 

Echo’s TV-MA rating is one of many firsts for Marvel. Last year, the studio announced it would forego its traditional method of dropping episodes weekly, and instead release them all at once. The show will also be the first Marvel Disney Plus series to simultaneously premiere on Hulu. Most of all, it will be the first MCU project to center around a Deaf and Native American superhero. Like her character, Cox is both Deaf and Native American, as well as a member of the amputee community.

By the time Echo premieres on Jan. 10, 2024, almost three years will have passed since it was announced to be in development. While the trailer clearly emphasizes the resolution to at least one cliffhanger, only time will tell whether its prolonged delay was too much of a hindrance to come back from. Its TV-MA rating will undoubtedly attract curious fans, but whether its story will be strong enough to keep them around is another matter entirely.