The Marvel Cinematic Universe has succeeded beyond everyone’s wildest dreams. The franchise delivers blockbuster after blockbuster and rakes in billions of dollars, so it’s hardly surprising that the studio is making plans beyond the cataclysmic Avengers: Infinity War, which will wrap up plotlines that have been building since Phase One.
Said plans (revealed in an interview with Kevin Feige in Vanity Fair) involve an astonishing 20 upcoming films in the franchise, which by my estimate should take us all the way up to 2030. And that’s not including the unreleased MCU movies currently in various stages of production like Black Panther, Ant-Man and the Wasp, and the upcoming Avengers double bill.
It’s safe to say that somewhere in these 20 films will be sequels to current Phase 3 pics like Spider-Man: Homecoming and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, but the scope of the next ten years makes us wonder what else they’ve got up their sleeves.
We’ve been promised that things will be “entirely different” after Infinity War wraps up, and I’d bet we might start seeing some passing on of the mantles to a younger generation (that, or beginning to kill off our favorites). I mean, will Robert Downey Jr. still be squeezing into the Iron Man armor in his sixties? Will Marvel even want to continue paying his $80 million payday?
On top of that, Feige is notoriously eager to get the whole Marvel universe under the MCU banner. Right now, Fox seems pretty possessive of the X-Men, but it seems plausible that they could show up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe at some point should Disney end up purchasing their rival studio.
Either way, it looks like exciting times ahead if you’re a Marvel fan. A while back I was wondering when the comic book movie bubble was going to burst, but we’re approaching two decades of the superhero renaissance (I mark the modern era as starting with Bryan Singer’s X-Men) and the genre still shows no signs of critical or box office fatigue yet. At least, not when it comes to the House of Ideas.