The timeline for the next phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been extended. According to Entertainment Weekly, Marvel Studios revealed this week that the release dates for its next two Avengers films have been pushed back. Avengers: Doomsday, which was originally slated to release on May 1, 2026, will now come out on December 18, 2026. The follow-up, Avengers: Secret Wars, was similarly pushed back from May 7, 2026 to December 17, 2026.
So if you were planning to spend your next two summers with the Avengers, surprise, you'll now be ringing in the holidays with them instead. Fortunately, this isn't that bad of a delay; at least Doomsday and Secret Wars are still planned for the same year they were originally going to come out, just seven months later.
This change to Marvel's release schedule comes only a couple of months after they announced the core cast for the fifth Avengers movie, Avengers: Doomsday. That one will feature Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Sebastian Stan as the Winter Soldier, Anthony Mackie as Captain America/Sam Wilson, Vanessa Kirby as the Invisible Woman/Sue Storm, Paul Rudd as Ant-Man, Letitia Wright as Black Panther/Shuri, Wyatt Russell as John Walker/U.S. Agent, Tenoch Huerta Mejía as Namor/The Submariner, Ebon Moss-Bachrach as The Thing/Ben Grimm, Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova/Black Widow, Kelsey Grammer as Beast, Lewis Pullman as Bob, Danny Ramirez as Falcon/Joaquin Torres, Joseph Quinn as Human Torch/Johnny Storm, David Harbour as Red Guardian, Winston Duke as M’Baku, Hannah John-Kamen as Ghost/Ava Starr, Tom Hiddleston as Loki, Patrick Stewart as Professor X/Charles Xavier, Ian McKellen as Magneto/Erik Lehnsherr, Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler/Kurt Wagner, Rebecca Romijn as Mystique, James Marsden as Cyclops, Channing Tatum as Gambit/Remy LeBeau, Pedro Pascal as Mr. Fantastic/Reed Richards, Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom.
Yes, this cast is stacked as hell, featuring characters from across the MCU as well as Fox's X-Men franchise. It'll be interesting to see how Marvel balances having so many of its power players onscreen all in one movie, since the amount of characters in the MCU has ballooned so drastically in the years following its last major crossover event movie, Avengers: Endgame.
What does the Avengers delay mean for the next two Avatar movies?
This Marvel delay might give us a bit of insight into the state of another big Disney franchise, James Cameron's Avatar. The second Avatar movie, Avatar: The Way of Water, came out on December 16, 2022. The upcoming third movie, Avatar: Fire and Ash, is slated to release this holiday season on December 19, 2025.
Ther eare two more Avatar movies to go after that. Cameron filmed part of Avatar 4 concurrently with the second and third movies, but there's still a lot of work to be done on it. Filming on the rest of the movie has been underway since early 2024; actor Stephen Lang (Miles Quaritch) posted a behind-the-scenes photo of himself in a motion capture suit working on the film. Avatar 4 is tentatively slated to release in December 2029.
To my eye, Disney and Marvel moving their next two Avengers movies to the holiday season is a commitment to filling those holiday slots with their next biggest movies. Now they have a solid line-up for the Christmas box office for the next three years, and only need to worry about 2028 before Avatar 4 drops in 2029. With how many film studios Disney owns these days, there's little doubt they'll find something else to fill the void.
In the meantime, the next Marvel movie coming down the pike is The Fantastic Four: First Steps. That will serve as the formal introduction of the Fantastic Four into the MCU, and as we see in the cast list above, they'll all be returning for Avengers: Doomsday. It should be a fun one when it drops in theaters on July 25.
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