‘Wouldn’t you need to have watched ‘Hawkeye’ to know why Kingpin has a missing eye?’: Marvel ordering us to forget canon for the 1st time in 15 years is unsurprisingly breaking brains

The long-awaited first-look trailer for Echo finally imbued the oft-overlooked upcoming series with some serious hype, but then Marvel immediately went and dropped the ball by announcing the Alaqua Cox vehicle was actually the first in a confusing new subthread of MCU content: Marvel Spotlight.

According to producer Brad Winderbaum, Marvel Spotlight is a new brand of Marvel Studios productions that are inessential to the overall franchise plotline, akin to those “comics fans didn’t need to read.” Apart from being the first time the House of Ideas has told us to disregard wider continuity — you know, the thing that makes the MCU the unique, industry-defining shared universe that it is — in fifteen years, folks are also getting confused that Echo, of all things, is the first Marvel Spotlight project.

As the trailer makes abundantly clear, Echo directly follows up on the events and narrative of Hawkeye, in which we learned that Maya Lopez was Kingpin’s adoptive niece and, what’s more, she shot him in the eye after discovering the truth of his evil ways. So those tying themselves in knots over on the Marvel Studios subreddit as they try to make sense of this paradox are more than forgiven.

“Marvel Spotlight states that they have individual MCU projects that are not connected and it’s [d]ebuting with Echo,” shared one perplexed user, “but wouldn’t you [n]eed to have watched Hawkeye to know details about her and why Kingpin has a [m]issing eye?”

Others are arguing that while Echo is somewhat reliant on Hawkeye, it’s not like what happened between Maya and Wilson Fisk can’t be recapped fairly easily in the show. Meanwhile, many other MCU productions require reams of background knowledge going back years and years. Generally, most assume Marvel Spotlight simply translates as “anything that has nothing to do with the Avengers.” Like one user put it, “I think they mean ‘don’t expect Echo to have set-up for Secret Wars or any vital Avengers stuff.'”

Even so, everything Marvel Studios has made since 2008 has been promoted as being part of a larger whole, so now that even official productions are being treated like Marvel Television offerings it’s leaving fans questioning everything about the make-up of the MCU. And you thought Echo wasn’t going to be important.

Echo hits Disney Plus in a bingeable batch of five episodes on Jan. 10.