Disney Announces 26 New Release Dates, Including Marvel Films Through 2022
Disney already made waves this afternoon when the studiomoved Marvel’sAvengers: Infinity Warup by a week. But that was just an appetizer compared to today’s main course: the studio has announced more than two dozen new release dates from now until2023, including Marvel release dates all the way through2022. Let’s see if we can figure out what some of these are.
Disney’s New Release Dates
Here are all of the Disney release dates they’ve claimed starting with next year, with the new dates in bold (courtesy ofExhibitor Relations):
That’s alotof untitled movies. Let’s attempt to narrow down what some of these may be. To make it easy, we’ll break our speculation into sections.
Marvel Studios
Let’s look at the Marvel release dates first. I’ll drop our guesses into the following untitled slots, updated from thelast time we guessed about them:
We don’t yet know who’s going to survive the next twoAvengersmovies, but since Marvel has historically worked in trilogies, it makes sense that we’d see those franchises filled out for characters like Ant-Man and the Wasp, Black Panther, Captain Marvel, and Doctor Strange. We also know the Marvel Cinematic Universe is going to get more cosmic afterAvengers 4, and withBlack Widowin the works, hopefully that will do well enough to warrant a sequel of its own.
This is the first year Lucasfilm will be releasing twoStar Warsmovie in the same year, and even though Rian Johnson is developing a new trilogy and theGame of Thronescreators are working on their own separate series of films, it still may be a few years before they make that pace their new normal. That means we could see something like this:
Live Action
Here’s where things get trickier. There’s been at least one live action adaptation of a Disney animated classic for the past few years, and next year will have two withThe Lion KingandDumbo. There are 19 Disney live action slots listed on that chart, so it’d be foolish to try to accurately guess every one of them. But we knowPeter Pan, Jungle Cruise, The Little Mermaid, Maleficent 2, Pinocchio, Labyrinth, Lady and the Tramp, Disenchanted, Cruella,andThe Sword in the Stoneare in the works – though a few of those could end up debuting on the studio’s new streaming service. Your guess is as good as ours.
Again, this is largely speculation on our part. And frankly, it’s kind of terrifying that any studio is releasing a calendar that’sthisfull this early. But it’s all about staking claims to dates in order to dominate competition, and other companies are certainly going to think twice about scheduling something against a few of these behemoths. And Disney hasn’t even acquired Fox yet. Think about how wild an announcement like this could be in a year or two. shudders
