(L-R) John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) and Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) in Marvel Studios’ THUNDERBOLTS*. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2024 MARVEL.
Courtesy of Marvel Studios
Tired of superheroes yet? Well, Marvel doesn’t think you are. After a whole lot of ups and downs since Avengers: Endgame, Marvel is trying to turn things around in 2026 with Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Avengers: Doomsday, likely to be billion-dollar grossers. We know that the plan after that is Avengers: Secret Wars, introducing the X-Men, and then a full-on X-Men launch after that with a movie from Thunderbolts director Jake Schreier.
But that’s 2027. How about 15 years after that?
MCU head Kevin Feige spoke to Chinese outlet Watching Hollywood, and said that Secret Wars will establish a “streamlined, simplified, single universe that audiences can keep up with.” That would be the end of the multiverse saga, and presumably some viewers being confused about which dimension who is in. One world from here, probably one timeline as well. A good idea, given where we’ve been the past few years.
Feige goes on to say there are almost comically long plans for the MCU from there:
“We were just in a Marvel Studios meeting room, planning movies all the way up to 2042,” Feige said. “Whether we can make it to 2042? Who knows? Will it be those movies? Who knows? But this is how we approach and plan the vast amount of potential stories in the comics. We’re constantly changing, constantly evolving, but having some guidance helps us act more purposefully… especially with X-Men, it’s already had 10 movies, some very, very good, some I think haven’t lived up to expectations — how do we plan the Mutant Saga in a very grand way?”
So, the X-Men would be a large chunk of those 15 years, and it seems like things may finally be moving away from the Avengers to some extent. Given the hodgepodge team we can see in Doomsday, it does seem like those days are already fading. It’s not even clear who the Avengers team is supposed to be there. Sam Wilson Captain America, Ant-Man, Thor and I guess the Thunderbolts if they combine forces? Not exactly the Infinity War era.
Feige taking on the X-Men is a huge challenge. He’s right that there have been 10 X-Men movies, so it will be hard to break away from those, which had two sets of younger and older heroes. We’re still seeing those characters, for better or worse, as of Doomsday, so replacing them instantly with a younger cast will be…strange.
Other than the 2042 movie plan, we also have the head of Marvel TV saying that he wants loads of X-Men ’97 as Marvel’s other Disney Plus TV plans seem mostly in flux outside of mainly Daredevil and friends:
“Brad’s [Winderbaum] bursting up and down and you know he wants to do 10, and we want him to do 10. We want eight years from now to be having more conversations like this about season 10. With 60 years of comics and all these characters…there’s really no limit,” X-Men ’97 developer Eric Lewald said to POC Culture in a recent interview.
Season 2 of X-Men ’97 has proven excellent, and season 4 is already greenlit. The show had a not-long wait between its first two seasons, and if this can become a yearly offering, that would help bolster Marvel’s overall X-Men focus from here. And 10 more seasons, speed-depending, could also run until around 2042 as well…
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.