2021 Will Have a New MCU Project Almost Every Week
Expect a new movie or tv show episode to watch that continues the MCU story almost every Friday of 2021 starting January 15th.
Has anyone else felt strange that it’s been well over a year without any MCU project being released? There was some side stuff this year, like Agents of SHIELD and Helstrom but neither of those is technically canon in the MCU.
This isn’t Marvel or Disney’s fault, the pandemic affected pretty much all movies and TV shows being made and distributed this year. And there’s no telling how long the effects of that will last.
On a positive note, it did give some time for Avengers: Endgame to stand on its own as being a good ending without rushing with multiple new projects. I remember after Endgame a lot of my friends were saying they were hoping the MCU took a break for a couple of years. And now by the time Black Widow comes out, it will have been almost 2 years without an MCU film.
But on the downside due to there being 6 MCU TV shows on Disney+ and 4 MCU films (not to mention two Sony Marvel movies which seem to be canon in the MCU multiverse even if they’re not part of the main timeline) that is almost one new movie or TV episode a week.
In the TV show front we have WandaVision in January, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier in March, Loki in May, What If? in the summer, and then Ms. Marvel and Hawkeye later in the year.
For the movies we have Black Widow in May, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings in July, Eternals in November, and a third Spider-Man movie (probably called Spider-Man: Homesick) in December. Then we have the Sony Marvel movies Morbius in March and Venom: Let there be Carnage in June. Those two still don’t necessarily count but I wanted to include them.
The schedule is roughly the same amount of content in 2022, and doing the math and assuming each show has at least 6 episodes. This leads to there only being about two months' worth of weeks of no MCU content which isn’t much of a break.
On one level, this is dope. I love Marvel, I love these characters, and I’m excited about all the interesting and talented directors and writers that have been brought on to these projects.
I like how weird they seem to be too, WandaVision and Eternals seem to be really different takes on the characters than the MCU has seen before. It reminds me of when the first Guardians of the Galaxy came out. It was just so different from everything else the MCU has offered.
Maybe the thing I’m least excited about is Black Widow, but that’s just because I never cared for the character as much as others. But I still think it’s cool she got a movie and I do want to see it. But out of all the projects in 2021, I feel like this one is the most “more of the same” when compared to everything else on the docket.
I also can’t wait for anything Spider-Man related. I’m such an unashamed Spidey fan that I’ll probably still love the movies even if I think they’re bad. I mean, I even enjoyed aspects of Amazing Spider-Man 2. So I am excited to see whatever this new movie brings.
I also can’t wait to see Ms. Marvel come to life, Kamala Khan is one of the best creations from Marvel this past decade or so. I can’t wait to see how they bring this character to live-action.
I’m also hyped for all the other projects, but we’ve seen so little from them. I don’t have much to say other than I want to watch them.
But on the other hand of this equation, this is a lot. This will probably result in more official MCU content in hours than the entirety of the first two phases of the MCU combined.
I just hope that it doesn’t become overwhelming or that some shows will fall through the cracks. Plenty of seasons of the Netflix Marvel shows had that fate.
There’s also the worry that this is too much content for a studio to handle. Especially when so many of the producers at Marvel work on each project.
I have complete confidence that the rest of the team is more than capable of telling and delivering fun comic book stories. But I can’t ignore just how much of a workload this is either.
I’m not sure if making this much content is sustainable for the employees making these movies and shows.
But I would also like to be proven wrong, and by the time May or June of 2021 hits when we have consumed all of this content and dug ourselves deeper and deeper into consumerism, I’m sure we’ll know if it is working out consistently.
And for more about how the future of the MCU, you can read my article about how Spider-Man and the Fantastic 4 movie will connect here.
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