At their much-anticipated Comic-Con panel yesterday, Marvel Studios revealed their plans for 2020-21, with 10 properties – that’s five movies and five TV shows – making up the slate. As Kevin Feige also teased more projects to come after these, like Blade, Fantastic Four and the rebooted X-Men, we assumed that Phase Four would continue on beyond 2021. However, the Marvel Studios president has now confirmed that Thor: Love and Thunder will wrap up the next chapter of their cinematic universe.
At least, that’s the current plan. While speaking to Collider following the panel, Feige clarified that the November 2021 release is intended to be the final installment in Phase Four. That said, he did remind us that Marvel’s plans for Phase Three went through changes after their original announcement, so he warned that things could always change in the future.
“It is the complete Phase Four the way I announced the complete Phase Three five years ago—things can move, things can change as they did if you go back and look at what we talked about five years ago for Phase Three, but we’ve been working on this for quite a while and it’s pretty set. But there are always changes.”
This is somewhat surprising, as previous phases have lasted at least three years, with Phase Three being the longest – stretching from 2016-19 and encompassing 11 movies. Now that the MCU has properly gone multimedia, though, we’ll have to adjust to the phases being measured differently. The Disney Plus TV shows will be key parts of the ongoing narrative, unlike the Netflix and Hulu shows made by Marvel Television, so when you think of it this way, Phase Four’s 10 properties is comparable to Phase Three’s 11.
To recap, we have Black Widow and The Eternals in 2020, while 2021 brings TV shows WandaVision and Loki arriving in the early months of the year, alongside February’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness then drops in May, with the What If…? animated series releasing in mid-2021. Finally, Thor: Love and Thunder rounds out the phase on November 5th.