At San Diego Comic-Con today Marvel unleashed a flurry of announcements, including the end of Phase 4 and timelines for Phases 5 and 6. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever will now close out Phase 4 of the MCU on Nov. 11, 2022, and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is now officially kicking off Phase 5.
Under this new plan, Phase 6 will roll out with the upcoming Fantastic Four movie, and will wrap up a year later with a double-header: Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Avengers: Secret Wars. The first half of this two-parter, Kang Dynasty, will be released May 2, 2025, with Secret Wars coming Nov. 7, 2025.
Marvel didn’t announce any of the cast members or other creatives attached to these new Avengers movies, but a good portion of the Ant-Man 3 panel was devoted to the threat that Kang (played by Jonathan Majors) poses to the wider MCU. “There will be conquering,” Majors told the audience at Hall H on Saturday, and there’s plenty of comics backstory to back him up.
Kang looks to be an even more formidable foe than Thanos, but there’s an even more cataclysmic inspiration for the final chapter in Phase 6. As comics editor Susana Polo wrote, Jonathan Hickman’s Secret Wars “evokes the granddaddy of all event comics, DC Comics’ Crisis on Infinite Earths, with a promise of universal armageddon and the mashing up of different parallel earths.” Hickman also played a significant role in reshaping the first family of Marvel, the Fantastic Four, so it looks like Phase 6 will see even more of his work brought to screen.
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