Wait, Avengers: Endgame isn’t the end of Marvel’s third phase?
By Dan Selcke
If you didn’t know, Marvel films come in phases. The first phase started way back in 2008 with Iron Man and concluded with the box office-busing Avengers in 2012. Phase two started with Iron Man 3, climaxed with Avengers: Age of Ultron and concluded with the lightweight Ant-Man, which provided a bit of a reset. We’re currently in Phase 3, which began with 2016’s Captain America: Civil War and will end with…
…Avengers: Endgame, right? The hugely anticipated superhero team-up movie set to open in theaters this Friday? You’d think so, but according to Marvel boss Kevin Feige, no. Speaking at a fan event in Shanghai, Feige revealed that Phase 3 will officially end with Spider-Man: Far From Home, which hits theaters on July 5.
In the long run, this doesn’t mean much. Whether you keep track of the phases of Marvel movies or not, you’re going to get more of them. There’s a Black Widow spinoff in the works, and a movie about Hawkeye protege Kate Bishop, and movies about newcomers The Eternals and Shang-hai. We don’t know which of these films will make it to market first, but we know the first Phase 4 movie will be out May 1 of 2020, whatever it is.
Still, this represents a changing of the guard. There are a lot of new faces in the crowd, with Marvel surely hoping that some will replace heavy hitters destined to die in Endgame (or if not die, go into retirement). And then there are all the new Marvel superhero shows Disney is readying for its streaming service Disney+, which is out on November 12. Those include shows about Loki, one about Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and one about the Scarlet Witch and Vision called WandaVision, which is a stupid title until proven otherwise. According to Feige, these shows will intersect with the new crop of Marvel movies “in a very big way,” which wasn’t at all true of, say, the Marvel shows on Netflix.
So the average moviegoer probably can get by without watching the phases of the moon of Marvel, but there is a new one on the way. Change is coming.
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