Kevin Feige should feel more than comfortable with taking some serious creative swings, seeing as his Marvel Cinematic Universe has long since established itself as the biggest, most popular and single highest-grossing franchise in the history of the industry, and based on the upcoming slate of projects he’s keen to do just that.
When it was first announced that the MCU was expanding onto television via a series of Disney Plus exclusive shows, even the most optimistic of fans couldn’t have predicted that there would already be fourteen of them in the works. Marvel Studios just keeps on adding more and more content to the schedule, though, with the feature films bringing it up to a total of 27 projects in various stages of development, the vast majority of which will arrive before the end of 2023.
That’s going to be an incredibly difficult and very expensive volume of production to maintain, with insider Daniel Richtman now claiming that the studio see the future of the shared superhero mythology as being on streaming and will shift most of their focus there moving forward. And while the MCU and Star Wars have been positioned at the forefront of the Disney Plus revolution, it’s a bit hard to image one taking precedence over the other, especially when there’s already well over $22 billion box office dollars in the bank.
As things stand, the streaming shows are just ahead of the blockbuster movies, but the margins are close at fourteen to thirteen, while three of the former consists of two animated spinoffs and a holiday special, so if we’re splitting hairs, then there are more theatrical releases in the pipeline than Disney Plus exclusives. However, as the industry continues to undergo some seismic changes as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic, it can’t be ruled out that the MCU‘s focus definitively shifts elsewhere one day in the future.
