Last night, Marvel Studios finally announced their slate for the MCU’s next phase, consisting of a generous array of films and TV shows with heroes old and new. But while the production house’s schedule is looking pretty packed for the next couple of years, many fans couldn’t help but notice a few curious omissions from the Phase 4 calendar.
For one thing, the next Avengers flick has yet to be announced, despite ongoing rumors that the Young Avengers, Dark Avengers and New Avengers all have projects in the works. At the very least, now that Avengers: Endgame has passed Avatar to become the highest grossing film of all time, we can assume that Disney will find some way of resurrecting the name in future movies, but it seems that the Mouse House isn’t in too great a hurry to assemble the next incarnation of the team.
In an interview with IGN, Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige was asked why they chose not to feature any Avengers films in Phase 4, to which he replied:
“We had a movie this year called Avengers: Endgame, and it is very much an ending, as you saw, to so many of those characters. So Phase 4 is about beginnings, and Phase 4 is about learning new things about characters you already think you know like Black Widow, meeting incredible new characters like The Eternals and Shang-Chi, going on new adventures with Doctor Strange and Thor, and these Disney+ shows which I promise will be spectacular and not what anybody’s expecting.”
After releasing two Avengers movies in the space of just under a year, it’s probably the right call for Marvel to give the name a rest for a while. That being said, the MCU’s release schedule remains blank from 2022 onwards, and given the studio’s habit of dropping an Avengers film every three years (Endgame excepted), there’s every chance that the next installment will be one of the first MCU movies to arrive after 2021.
In the same interview, Feige also touched once more on the subject of X-Men. At last night’s panel, the producer casually name-dropped “mutants,” and while he doesn’t seem ready to elaborate on this tease just yet, Feige has said that their plans for the property will be “quite different” from what we saw in the Fox films.
As usual, it appears that Marvel’s latest announcements have left us with just as many questions as answers, but before the next team-up movie hits our screens, the MCU’s Phase 4 is set to launch with the release of Black Widow on May 1st, 2020.
