Marvel quietly admits there’s too much MCU homework

polygon.com:

Marvel Studios has been too good at its job. After 15 years of building up the MCU as the ultimate interconnected saga, audiences have really taken to heart the ideathat they need to see everything in order to catch the latest release. This was always going to be a concern — 15 years is a long time! Teenagers that saw Iron Manin theaters are now paying mortgages, spry adults circa 2008 now have to schedule “regular colonoscopy screenings.” It’s a different world, man!

But when taken in conjunction with the wider Marvel Studios turmoil, a nominal concern becomes a five-alarm fire. People need to know, or at least feel, like every new MCU show or film doesn’t come with a lengthy homework assignment. Marvel’s solution, then, is a new banner called Marvel Spotlight, which will debut when Echo premieres on Disney Plus and Hulu in Jan. 10, 2024.

A special early screening of Echo showed off the new banner, which comes with a title card and its own piano fanfare by Michael Giacchino, the famed Lost and Ratatouille composer also responsible for the regular Marvel Studios tune (and director of MCU TV movie Werewolf by Night). Developing a pre-roll title card for Spotlight titles signals just how serious Marvel is about letting people know about the studio’s intent here. In Echo’s case, according to Marvel Head of Streaming Brad Winderbaum, that’s to say “just like comics fans didn’t need to read Avengers or Fantastic Four to enjoy a Ghost Rider Spotlight comic, our audience doesn’t need to have seen other Marvel series to understand what’s happening in Maya’s story [in Echo].”

It is ironic that this is being used for a show about a character that was introduced in Hawkeye, with ties to a character from Daredevil, but that is