Avengers: Endgame ended the Infinity Saga and Spider-Man: Far From Home will end the MCU Phase 3. We are waiting for an announcement of the next big slate of MCU Phase 4, but as Feige has said, we will have to wait a bit for that. Everything will be revealed after Spider-Man: Far From Home, as Feige said, and now Disney CEO Bob Iger has confirmed it.
During the Walt Disney Company’s quarterly earnings call, we got to know quite a lot of info about Disney’s upcoming projects. Apparently, every Avatar sequel was delayed, and Disney added a new Star Wars movie into their release schedule. Bob Iger was asked about when Marvel will officially announce their next slate of projects and he said that the announcement is supposed to come sometime this Summer.
Logically, these announcements should come at the upcoming D23 Expo or perhaps at San Diego Comic Con. But Kevin Feige did confirm that there is a 5 year plan that is currently under works. He told Comicbook.com that the announcement will only come after Far From Home. He said:
“As we’ve been doing for years, we aren’t going to announce anything post-Avengers: Endgame or Spider-Man[: Far From Home] until post Endgame and Spider-Man. As you know as a fan, there’s a tremendous amount of potential and a tremendous amount of additional characters and storylines and groups of characters that we’re going to keep playing with. And again, that’s a testament to Marvel and to the amount of storylines and characters and amazing, amazing runs that have been in the Marvel comics.”
He then went on to talk about the upcoming slate, and the characters which will get to be a part of it. He said:
“The slate that we’re building over the next five years [is] not apples to apples. It is two very distinct things and I hope they’ll feel very distinct. But there is a similar mentality going into it, which is ‘How can we continue to tell stories with some of the characters that audiences already know and love in a unique way, in a different way, in surprising way, of which we have a lot of plans and ideas and work already going into it?’ [Then] ‘How can we introduce new characters that even hardcore fans, comic fans, have barely known or barely heard of.’ That’s really exciting too.
Some of these films will feature characters that you already know. Some supporting characters will assume leading roles, while some new characters will be introduced. The reward for all of these films working is that we get to try to do it again and do it differently and learn from our mistakes and try something we haven’t tried before.”
Although we are yet to know the “What,” we do know the “When” of the upcoming movies. Disney confirmed the release dates of the upcoming films and here are the probable names that could be attached to those dates:
May 1, 2020 (Black Widow)
November 6, 2020 (The Eternals)
February 12, 2021 (Black Panther 2 / Doctor Strange 2 / Shang Chi)
May 2, 2021 (Black Panther 2 / Doctor Strange 2)
November 5, 2021 (Doctor Strange 2 / Shang Chi)
February 18, 2022 (Captain Marvel 2)
May 6, 2022 (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3)
July 29, 2022 (Ant-Man and the Wasp 3 / Spider-Man 3).
Let’s see what happens. One thing we should be sure of is that these upcoming 4-5 years won’t involve any project from the Fox properties. So we shouldn’t expect X-Men or Fantastic Four to fall in these dates. Feige told io9:
“It’ll be a while. It’s all just beginning and the five-year plan that we’ve been working on, we were working on before any of that was set. So really, it’s just more, for us, less about specifics of when and where [the X-Men will appear] right now and more just the comfort factor and how nice it is that they’re home. That they’re all back. But it will be a very long time.”
Hopefully, Marvel will come in and surprise us all after Spider-Man: Far From Home.
