by With Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Marvel Studios is going to launch phase 5 of the MCU. However, studio president Kevin Feige is already considering Phase 7 because the franchise won’t be ending anytime soon.
The newly dubbed Multiverse Saga, which is expected to conclude with the release of Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Avengers: Secret Wars in 2025 and 2026, received updates on more than a dozen projects from Feige at San Diego Comic-Con 2022. However, even though there is a lot of anticipation for this impending slate, Phase 7 was spoken about in early discussions years before it really happened.
Phase 7’s only current clear details are a number of planned release dates from Marvel through the end of 2026, which may be when the new Phase begins following the mega-blockbuster Avengers 6 event.
Kevin Feige Reveals Plans for Phase 7
Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige provided an update on the studio’s intentions for Phase 7 of the MCU during the virtual news conference for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
Randall Park questioned how long in advance the MCU is planned, and Kevin Feige responded that the studio works on “three phases at a time:”
Park: “You really do have a plan. How many phases do you have planned in advanced?”
Feige: “We work in about three phases at a time… Three phases together, as we all know, make a saga.”
The recent completion of Phase 4 and the start of Phase 5 suggest that development on Phase 7 may be just getting started, leaving Marvel Studios’ present focus on the fifth, sixth, and seventh phases. Feige has stated that the MCU is created in three phases at a time.
This is further supported by the fact that Avengers: Secret Wars will be followed by four recently postponed Marvel films. Due to their exclusion from Feige’s slate, these as-yet-unnamed MCU projects would not be included in Phase 6, providing additional proof that Marvel Studios is now organising its seventh phase.
Feige summarised how he’s divided each project slate into Phases during the past 15 years thus far, noting that he “always has more movies on his mind.”
“We are making a lot of movies, and I always dreamed of making even more movies. And we sort of break it up into these phases. and I always dream of making even more movies, and we sort of break it up into these phases. So, from Iron Man to the first Avengers was one phase. Then, we would do Phase 2 to Avengers Age of Ultron, in turn to Endgame. Endgame ended what we called Phase 3, and now we started a new saga.”
Moving on to the recently concluded Phase 4 slate, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, he praised how Ant-Man 3 begins Phase 5 and introduces “a more specific storyline” before the upcoming two Avengers films:
“We’ve made a lot of films in Phase 4, the last of which was Wakanda Forever. We introduced a lot of characters in that. And now in this film, in large part to the man sitting in front of me, kicks off what we call Phase 5, which begins a more specific storyline heading to towards some Avengers films down the line.”
When Will Phase Seven Be Complete?
According to the timeframe Marvel has recently employed, the group only provided the initial confirmations for motion pictures and television programmes beyond Phase 4 during their July presentation at San Diego Comic-Con.
This confirmed that Phase 6 began with the two Avengers blockbusters and Fantastic Four as only three projects from that Phase were featured. The release of Deadpool 3 in November 2024 and the postponement of Blade until after Thunderbolts, which was initially declared the conclusion of Phase 5, could, however, cause that to change.
Feige’s comments are consistent with how he has previously announced projects, with the movies and TV shows in Phase 4 being made public only after the Infinity Saga concluded in 2019. Despite being a strong conclusion to the Infinity Saga, Avengers: Endgame had obvious connections to what was to come in Phase 4, so there’s a fair chance Feige and his team are considering how Secret Wars may set up Phase 7.
Given the variety of stories that might be explored in a post-Multiverse Saga plot, Phase 7 won’t likely be established until closer to when Phase 6 concludes. When the new slate does materialise over the following few years, there will be plenty of new content to fill it with, including prospective films like Black Panther 3 and Eternals 2.
On February 17, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania will launch the fifth phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
