With the Marvel Cinematic Universe having wrapped up “The Infinity Saga” with the conclusion of its Phase Three in 2019, there may not even be a Phase Four. Marvel Studios hasn’t even confirmed whether or not there will be a multi-phase successor to “Infinity Saga” (though of course, that saga wasn't officially named until it was almost over), and the MCU could actually leave the concept of phases behind.
As first announced, Phase Four would have consisted of five core Marvel Studios movies (plus the Sony-owned Spider-Man 3), three Sony Pictures Spidey spinoffs (that may or may not constitute official tie-ins to the MCU), and at least five television miniseries that will call Disney+ home. All of this looked to have been squished into just two calendar years, ranging from May 2020 to (at least) November 2021, starting with Black Widow and ending with Thor: Love and Thunder.
But with the recent reshuffling of the Phase Four release calendar due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, fans can’t - as of this moment, at least - be sure what the MCU's future will look like. Some movies still don’t have new releases dates yet, it’s entirely unknown just how affected the docket of Disney+ content will be, and it’s certainly possible that some of these installments will have gotten pushed back to Phase Five - or, conversely, that some of those Five entries may have been moved forward to Four.
It’s a lot to unpack, and it naturally leads to the question: does it even matter anymore what’s in one phase or another, especially after "The Infinity Saga"? Or could Marvel move on from phases altogether?
Thanks to the novel coronavirus that is affecting so much of Hollywood right now, the initially-announced release date of May 2020 for Black Widow was struck from the calendar, and that film has been pushed back to the next already-established opening day (November 6, 2020). This ripple effect has continued all the way throughout the next calendar year, making Thor: Love and Thunder (which, again, was the originally-declared end of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase Four) delayed to February 18, 2022 - a date that wasn’t officially attached to a project just yet, but which was nonetheless earmarked for the beginning of Phase Five.
Does the fourth Thor movie still officially constitute the end of this current phase? If the answer is yes, then this would be the very first time in what would be the MCU’s 13-year history that this situation would occur, with two phases sitting in the same year (Black Panther 2 will land in theaters three months after Love and Thunder, with Captain Marvel 2 following two months after that). Both of the previous times that Marvel attempted to pull off such a feat, following one new phase almost immediately after its predecessor’s finale, the studio ended up changing its mind. Ant-Man became Phase Two’s final installment in 2015, and Spider-Man: Far from Home did the same for Three in 2019. (It can also be argued that both of these movies work better as a denouement rather than as the grand kick-off to a new chapter, which might have played a role in Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige changing his mind.)
If, on the other hand, July 2022’s Captain Marvel 2 is now the ending of Phase Four instead of Thor: Love and Thunder, it almost completely overturns the new balance that Marvel was looking to establish with this very first post-“Infinity Saga” collection of stories: gone were the days of cramming every single MCU franchise into every single phase; here (presumably to stay) was the new approach of roughly dividing all properties, both pre-existing and brand new, among multiple phases. This is why the only sequels the studio had intended to include in the original version of Phase Four were Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, and Thor; Black Panther, Captain Marvel, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Ant-Man were all to be reserved for Phase Five.
If Marvel is indeed reverting this collection of films to the original "Infinity Saga" approach, then all those other remaining movies may very well be included in Phase Four as well, making it much like the three-year-, 11-picture-long Phase Three. This could mean that audiences might even be able to expect a grand Avengers climax to come at the end once again. (It’s unknown whether this would affect the potential plans of having multiple Avengers teams possibly starring in multiple sequels, including the possibility of an all-female A-Force.)
But why stop there? There’s a mystery Marvel film still set for October 7, 2022, which is more than likely Blade and which then opens up the door for all the further projects that Marvel had revealed during last year’s San Diego Comic Con, such as Fantastic Four and, just possibly, the X-Men. And then there’s the whole glut of Disney+ productions, which have continued to grow with such additions as Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, and, most excitingly, Moon Knight, and which have all been declared to reside in the Phase Four pantheon. At this rate, it feels as if Phase Four will never end - which, ironically, was kind of originally the point.
Even before the two-part grand finale to “The Infinity Saga” came out in 2018 and '19, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige was dropping hints as to what the post-Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame landscape would look like. Feige said that, rather than continuing the phase structure, the future may hold a “new thing,” perhaps hinting at a continuously-unspooling story that would no longer have the need to be broken up into season-like chunks.
This initial post-Phase Three approach sounds similar to what Warner Bros. had attempted to do with its ultimately-short-lived DC Expanded Universe: while previous movies would foreshadow and pay off in subsequent installments or franchises, it would just be one simple, continuously expanding story that had no specific climaxes to build up to, even if they were more along the smaller, season finale variety (exactly what the Avengers installments are). In this way, “Infinity Saga” was more than just a specific story that united the first few phases together into a more cohesive narrative - it was a whole different, albeit temporary, take on the Marvel mythology whose ending abrogated the need for further phases. (In this format, one can’t help but get the impression that Feige and Marvel would have just continued to produce new sequels and spinoffs until the business had kind of sputtered out, and the MCU would’ve just coasted to a gentle end - exactly what ended up happening to the DCEU proper.)
By slicing up all of the different properties and distributing them among both Phases Four and Five, it showed that Marvel was willing to keep experimenting with its storytelling approach, even if it was still within the moniker of phases. With this now apparently gone, fans are suddenly facing the prospect of Phase Four becoming almost utterly indistinguishable from Five, whatever form its roster ends up ultimately taking – meaning, in a sense, Phase Four could still end up being that flattened, elongated storytelling landscape that Feige was toying with all the way back in 2017.
Then again, given this prospect – and given the constant stream of changes that have buffeted it, especially in these suddenly-disrupting times of the coronavirus pandemic – it wouldn’t at all be surprising to see Feige change his mind (again) and ultimately go back to dropping the Phase Four name altogether.
