After the Endgame comes the… not-the-endgame?
OK so there probably won’t be a Marvel film called Actually It’s Not The Endgame, but it turns out Endgame wasn’t the end for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, far from it.
As fans will know, Avengers: Endgame wasn’t even the end of Phase Three of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, that honour went to Spider-Man: Far From Home, which was released earlier this month. And while we all knew Phase Four was just around the corner, we didn’t know exactly which films it would involve. Until now.
Marvel Studios recently unveiled their slate for Phase Four including five films that will take us through to the end of 2021, so I hope you’re hungry for a Marvel feast because that’s a lot of MCU films in the next two and a half years!
The upcoming films are: Black Widow (May 1, 2020), The Eternals (November 6, 2020), Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (February 12, 2021), Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness (May 7, 2021), and Thor: Love and Thunder (November 5, 2021).
While five series will also launch on Disney+, these include Falcon and the Winter Soldier (Autumn 2020), WandaVision (Spring 2021), Loki (Spring 2021), What If (Summer 2021), and Hawkeye (Autumn 2021).
The studio revealed the slate as Marvel president Kevin Feige appeared at San Diego Comic-Con. Feige also had time to say he didn’t have time to talk about whether the Fantastic Four or the X-Men would be joining the MCU now that they’re all under the Disney umbrella, but fingers crossed for Phase Five, or Six, or Seven…
While we can look forward to a few original films, such as The Eternals, it seems Phase 4 will consist mainly of sequels and origin stories for characters we already know.
Black Widow kicks things off, presumably with a pre-Endgame plot, while we also get new instalments of Thor and Dr. Strange.
Elsewhere, we also get the first big-screen look at Shang-Chi, who in the comics joins the Avengers, and is famous for his mastery of Kung Fu and the ability to create duplicates of himself. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings will be the superhero’s live action debut.
We’ll also get our first look at the Eternals – a genetically-altered race of super-beings, the result of ‘celestial experiments’, who live for thousands of years. The cast is rumoured to include Angelina Jolie, Kumail Nanjiana, and a certain Keanu Reeves (possibly). So, better get saving for those cinema tickets now, it’s going to be a Marvel-heavy few years.
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Charlie Cocksedge is a journalist and sub-editor at UNILAD. He graduated from the University of Manchester with an MA in Creative Writing, where he learnt how to write in the third person, before getting his NCTJ. His work has also appeared in such places as The Guardian, PN Review and the bin.