New info revealed a significant delay for Marvel Studios' Disney+ series Echo.
The upcoming MCU show is set to follow Alaqua Cox's Maya Lopez, who fans may remember from last year's Hawkeye.
The projects had been initially slated for a "Summer 2023" release, sitting right behind Loki Season 2 on Marvel Studios' Comic Con 2022 slate.
However, that specific release timing has come into question as of late, as production on the title supposedly has not gone all that smoothly. Insider Lizzie Hill from The Cosmic Circus recently took to Twitter, noting that there have seemingly been problems with Echo, and she is "concerned."
Hill said she was not ready to report anything at the time, but "[she] sincerely [hopes] this one comes out and it's fine."
And now, just under a month since Hill's cryptic Tweets, fans may have their first official hint at a big delay for Disney+'s Echo.
Marvel's Echo Gets Release Date Delayed
After previously being announced with an Early Summer 2023 release window, the MCU streaming series Echo has seemingly been delayed at least six months.
Speaking on the newly-released The Writers Panel podcast (via the Cosmic Circus), Echo showrunner Marion Dayre noted that the show will debut "a year from when [the podcast] comes out."
The news shocked podcast host Ben Blacker, who thought the series was "within months" of its release:
Blacker: This [the podcast] comes out in a week or two. When does Echo premiere?
Dayre: “That will be probably a year from when this comes out.”
Blacker: “Oh, are you kidding?! I thought it was like within months…Geez, I’m sorry.”
With this new info straight from the source of Echo's showrunner, fans shouldn't expect the series to debut until the final months of 2023.
Dayre also addressed what it has been like coming on as a Marvel Studios showrunner, calling the experience a bit of a "crash course:"
"It was kind of a crash course, you know, because I came in as a Co EP and then changed… that changed a little bit, and so I didn’t start there at the ground level, but really like shifting and changing a process to work with deadlines. Like, 'Better Call Saul' very much uses a brick-by-brick process where we essentially break each episode three times. You do sort of a general overall break, and then we lay out some arcs, and then we go back in and brick by brick."
The Echo writer said there just "was not enough time to do it that way" on the series. So, she took pieces of what she had done before and "[laid] out some tent poles that we more or less stuck with:"
"There just simply was not enough time to do it that way. So it was sort of grabbing things from, like 'The Act', which was a limited series on Hulu, which we broke fairly quickly, so taking some of that, you know, laying out some tent poles that we more or less stuck with and shifting them around with the way that we did."
She remarked her early work on the MCU project was " really about finding a process," commenting that he she had more time she "would have done it a little bit differently:"
"So it was really about finding a process in the moment that allowed me to get to some deadlines and, you know, be a little more flexible than I would have been if, you know, if I had my all the time in the world I would have done it a little bit differently.”
Why Was Echo Delayed?
This is going to be saddening for fans who were eagerly anticipating Maya Lopez's MCU return after an exciting debut in last year's Hawkeye.
What will be interesting to see is if this move is because of the rumored production problems the series is facing, or if it is the first move in what could be some widespread delays across the Marvel Studios slate.
What is notable is that Echo has seemingly already finished filming. So, if it has been pushed because of a troubled production, that could mean reshoots might be in the series' very near future.
Some lucky fans have gotten a chance to see a brief glimpse of the series, shown at this year's D23 convention, so Marvel is slowly, but surely ramping up the Echo marketing machine.
But with the recent shake-ups high atop Disney's corporate ladder, perhaps what was once up to snuff for one regime is not for another.
While nothing has been confirmed from Marvel Studios itself, Echo will seemingly release in December 2023.
