What’s in Store for the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2021? - The Ringer

Following a pandemic-quieted 2020, Marvel has massive plans for the new year—starting with Disney+’s ‘WandaVision’ and only scaling up from there?

When Avengers: Endgame hit theaters in 2019, culminating a 20-plus movie arc in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it felt like the most successful franchise of the 21st century had finally reached a saturation point?

Instead of ringing in 2020 with more big-screen releases and Marvel Studios’ first forays into television on Disney+, the MCU took a mulligan on the entire year.

(That doesn’t include the final season of ABC’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hulu’s Helstrom, both produced by Marvel Television, which has now been folded into Marvel Studios.) For the first time in more than a decade, zero MCU movies were released in theaters for a full calendar year.

In a normal timeline, Black Widow would’ve been the first MCU release out of the Phase 4 pipeline; meanwhile, on the small screen, the more conventional The Falcon and the Winter Soldier should’ve preceded WandaVision.

Marvel—two more Disney+ series currently in production—will debut by the end of the year, and Sony Pictures plans to release its next Spider-Man movie in December.

Regardless of the order in which these Marvel projects come out, there’s a unifying ethos to the next phase of the MCU, and I mean that kind of literally: For once, Marvel’s television and film ambitions will be aligned.

As Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige previously explained, the plot threads of the Disney+ shows will bleed into the big-screen releases, and (presumably) vice versa.

And I haven’t even gotten to the third Guardians of the Galaxy movie (there will also be a Guardians Christmas special), a fourth Thor film bringing back Natalie Portman, a Black Panther sequel without the great Chadwick Boseman, as well as a host of MCU projects for the big screen and Disney+ in various stages of development for 2022 and beyond.

But the MCU has functioned more like a long-running TV series than a film franchise from its onset, so the pivot to actual television could be relatively seamless; plus, it doesn’t hurt that five of the past six Marvel movies (Black Panther, Infinity War, Captain Marvel, Endgame, and Far From Home) crossed the billion-dollar threshold at the box office.

But the series belies the studio’s massive ambitions to somehow improve upon releasing the highest-grossing movie of all time while trying to copy its record-breaking success on the small screen