“I’m just so proud to be able to represent a platform that is uplifting voices for indigenous people … we’re doing it the right way,” says star Alaqua Cox – who is herself deaf, indigenous and an amputee.

But the series comes at a delicate time for Disney, whose Marvel superhero films have struggled recently at the box office after over a decade of global domination.

In 2023, for the first time since 2016, Disney was not the highest-grossing studio in Hollywood, pipped by Universal.

Simultaneously, the company has found itself at the heart of the US culture wars, attacked by right-wing commentators and Republican politicians for becoming “too woke” in its storytelling.

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a presidential hopeful, has pounced upon complaints about the increasing prevalence of gay and non-binary characters in Disney films, from Lightyear to Elemental.

At a conference talk in November 2023, Disney CEO Bob Iger said that the company’s storytellers had become too concerned about introducing “positive messages” and had “lost sight of what their number-one objective needed to be”.

“What I’ve really tried to do is to return to our roots, which is remember we have to entertain first. It’s not about messages,” Iger said.

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With its diverse casting, Echo represents the culmination of a trend for Disney.

The Marvel superhero films launched in 2008 with Iron Man, starring Robert Downey Jr. It would take until the series’ 18th movie, Black Panther, that a solo lead character was not a white man.

Since then, there have been a plethora of diverse leads, even as box office returns have dipped.

But Bethany Lacina, an assistant professor at the University of Rochester, in the US state of New York, who has studied audience demographics, says there is no evidence to suggest the trends are linked.

Disney’s casting decisions “are moving their movies closer to what their audience has always been”, especially as young Americans become more diverse, she says.

“Non-white people are more likely to watch Marvel films than white people – particularly black people and white Hispanics,” she says.

Lacina suggests Iger’s comments may reflect “frustration” that simply casting non-traditional leads had not automatically brought in vast untapped minority audiences, as hoped.

Still, there is no evidence of a “backlash” from white viewers, who flocked to films like the Oscar-nominated Black Panther – a film singled out for praise by Iger at his November talk for “fostering acceptance”.

Instead, many analysts suggest Disney has simply produced too much content, including a dozen Marvel TV series, leading to what has been dubbed “superhero fatigue” as well as a perceived decline in quality.

According to Nick Carnes, editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and a professor at Duke University, in the US state of North Carolina, Disney’s entire Marvel project is “taking people who like a story about Iron Man or Spider-Man, and then exposing them to characters who are different”, he says.

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According to Carnes, Iger’s comments could simply reflect “a time when it is very fraught and very challenging to be a leader who engages with politics”.

The success or failure of Echo will still rest on the storytelling, he says.

“And at the end of the day, we’re all human beings,” says cast member Chaske Spencer, of Lakota Sioux origin, a Native American people.

“What it relates to is emotion … all of us can relate to that.”