The COVID-19 pandemic arrived at a rare downtime for the Marvel Studios machine. 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame” and the epilogue style “Spider-Man: Far from Home” marked the end of the company’s third ‘Phase’ of films.
Indeed that particular ‘Phase’ was the culmination of the ten years leading up to it, and so the first year of the fourth ‘Phase’ that was supposed to kick off with “Black Widow” in May 2020 was expected to be a relatively small and quiet affair.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit and with it came numerous delays to both production and releases. Now, as 2021 begins, it’s going to be a busy year for the brand with four films on the way (not including two Sony Marvel films), and at least four series if not more to premiere.
The company’s head Kevin Feige tells The New York Times that despite the various delays and even re-ordering of some projects, they got lucky and their Phase 4 plans are essentially unchanged.
He says “If the run we had in 2018 and 2019 had gotten disrupted this way, in the buildup to Endgame, it would have been a bigger headache. With these projects, it worked well.”
He also added that the debut dates for the upcoming Disney+ shows shifted only by a matter of weeks.
For now the plan is for the nine-episode “WandaVision” series to kick off Friday (January 15th) with a double-episode, followed by “Falcon and the Winter Soldier” on March 19th, then “Loki” sometime in May and “What If?” in July. Either the “Ms. Marvel” and/or “She-Hulk” series could arrive before year’s end as well.
The films start arriving early Summer with “Black Widow” on May 7th, “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” on July 9th, “Eternals” on November 5th, and the third “Spider-Man” on December 17th.
