Marvel fans! Have you finished hyperventilating yet? Go on, take a minute if you need it. Whether you were lucky enough to get a Hall H wristband or if you were just following along on Twitter, chances are there are at least a few upcoming Marvel projects that have your heart pumping. Marvel made some really exciting announcements at San Diego Comic-Con 2022, giving us glimpses of both new MCU projects and animated shows scheduled to stream on Disney Plus. Here’s what excited us the most!
Marvel Animation: X-Men and More
Marvel’s animation panel on Friday, moderated by Paul F. Tompkins, debuted a lot of exciting new projects and their premiere dates. First up was I am Groot, a series of animated shorts that will premiere on Disney Plus on August 10. The shorts will focus on Groot in his wee baby form, having adorable misadventures throughout the cosmos. Marvel also treated audience members to one full short, in which Groot takes a bath. Awww!
Fans who couldn’t attend the panel were treated to the trailer, which dropped online shortly afterwards.
The panelists also gave us some new details about Spider-Man: Freshman Year, revealing that the animation style will be an homage to the early Spidey comics, and that after Season 1 shows us Peter’s early days as a budding superhero, Season 2 will take us into his sophomore year. Season 1 will premiere in 2024.
Fans were also excited at the character reveals for X-Men ’97, which will pick up where the original series left off way back in 1997, with Professor X suffering a grave injury and leaving to get treatment on another planet. The panel confirmed that the series will feature Rogue, Beast, Storm, Jubilee, Jean Grey, Cyclops, and Wolverine, with Magneto leading the team in Xavier’s absence. X-Men ’97 will premiere in Fall 2023.
The animation panel also announced that What If…? Season 2 will arrive in 2023, with the spin-off series Marvel Zombies arriving sometime after.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
At Marvel’s Hall H panel on Saturday, Kevin Feige announced that Black Panther 2: Wakanda Forever, premiering on November 11, 2022, will be the last entry in Marvel’s Phase 4. Director Ryan Coogler gave an emotional tribute to the late Chadwick Boseman, who played King T’Challa/Black Panther in the first film. Coogler said that “Chad’s passion and genius and his culture and the impact he made on this industry will be felt forever,” and that “We put our love for Chadwick into this film.” Then, after years of secrecy around the sequel, we finally saw the first teaser trailer, which included the first look at Namor the Sub-Mariner (Tenoch Huerta), Riri Williams/Ironheart (Dominique Thorne), and Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) taking the throne of Wakanda in the aftermath of T’Challa’s death.
The Phase 5 Slate
Fans were hoping that the Hall H panel would reveal the next few years of Marvel’s films and TV series, and Feige didn’t disappoint. Here’s the full rundown of all the phase 5 projects we can look forward to in 2023 and 2024:
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania: February 17, 2022
Secret Invasion: Spring 2023
Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3: May 5, 2023
The Marvels: July 28, 2023
Loki Season 2: Summer 2023
Echo: Summer 2023
Blade: November 3, 2023
Ironheart: Fall 2023
Agatha: Coven of Chaos (formerly Agatha: House of Harkness): Winter 2023
Daredevil: Born Again: Spring 2024
Captain America: New World Order: May 3, 2024
Thunderbolts: July 26, 2024
There’s enough good stuff here to blow a fuse in any Marvel fan’s brain, but of all the titles that were announced or got release dates, fans were most excited about Daredevil: Born Again. A new Daredevil series has been rumored ever since Matt Murdock’s (Charlie Cox) cameo in Spider-Man: No Way Home. Even more exciting, the new Daredevil series will consist of a whopping 18 episodes, unlike the 6 or 9 episodes in Marvel’s other Disney Plus shows. Daredevil fans were well fed this weekend.
Also exciting was the release date for Loki Season 2 and the official announcement of a Thunderbolts movie. In the comics, the Thunderbolts, also known as the “Dark Avengers,” is a group of reformed villains, and when La Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) started recruiting John Walker/U.S. Patriot (Wyatt Russell) and Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) in Phase 4, fans began speculating that a Thunderbolts team was in the works. Pugh’s Yelena has been a fan favorite ever since her debut in Black Widow, so it’ll be thrilling to see her take center stage in Thunderbolts.
Phase 6: The Multiverse Saga Comes to a Head
At the end of the Hall H panel, Feige unveiled the collective title for Phases 4-6 of the MCU: The Multiverse Saga. The title, of course, comes from the growing presence of the multiverse that we’ve seen in Phase 4, from the destruction of the Sacred Timeline in Loki to the looming threat of incursions (universe-destroying collisions of realities) in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
Feige also unveiled three titles in the MCU’s Phase 6, along with a lot of release dates for movies and series that are still under wraps. So far, though, we know that the Fantastic Four will kick off Phase 6 on November 8, 2024, and the next two Avengers movies will both premiere in 2025 (yes, that’s two Avengers movies in one year!). Avengers 5 will premiere on May 2, 2025, and Avengers 6 will come out on November 7, 2025.
The full titles of the Avengers films were also exciting. Avengers 5 is called Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, which means that Jonathan Majors’s Kang, who made his debut as He Who Remains in Loki Season 1, will be the Big Bad. In the comics, The Kang Dynasty focuses on Kang’s efforts to take over the world.
Avengers 6 will be called Avengers: Secret Wars. Fans have been speculating all throughout Phase 4 that the MCU was headed towards a Secret Wars adaptation, and now it’s official. In the comics, Secret Wars centers on an incursion that threatens to destroy the universe.
When will fans get more details about Phase 6 and other Marvel projects? There’s some speculation that Marvel will reveal more at the next D23 Expo, which runs September 9-11, 2022 in Anaheim, CA.
In the meantime, what MCU projects are you most excited about? Do you have any theories about what those mystery Phase 6 projects might be? Let us know in the comments!
Published: Jul 24, 2022 03:03 pm