Marvel Studios has given us a hell of a lot to get excited about lately. We expected them to hype up projects like Black Widow, Eternals and Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. What we didn’t expect, though, was announcements like Doctor Strange and Scarlet Witch teaming up in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Natalie Portman taking up the hammer in Thor: Love and Thunder and, completely out of left field, a new Blade movie. But this smorgasbord of MCU information could have been even bigger.
Speaking in an interview with MTV, Kevin Feige revealed that the studio considered announcing all of Phase 5 at the same time, but ultimately chose not to:
“We debated what we should announce today. Should we announce 4 and 5? We’ve planned them out, we’ve got five years down the road and I was like, I think eleven projects in two years is plenty. Having not mentioned anything for two or three years.”
Now, Blade is said to be one of the initial Phase 5 films, but we can already surmise at least some of what wasn’t announced at Comic-Con. We know that sequels Black Panther 2, Captain Marvel 2, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Spider-Man 3 are in some stages of development. Similarly, we know from Feige’s cryptic comments at the end of the panel that Marvel Studios are hard at work on bringing the Fantastic Four and X-Men to the MCU. And then there’s whatever the next Avengers film will be, which will include a “very different team than we’ve seen before.”
In total, that comes to 13 movies that we know of. Typically, Marvel has released three films per year. Given that they have plans to release just two in 2020 (Black Widow and Eternals), that means that Feige is right when he said previously that the current production should take us through to 2024.
Whatever Phase 5 holds, at least we know the MCU is still going to be a constant in our lives. I don’t envy anyone doing a full marathon by the mid-2020s, though.
