Loki TV show, Spider-Man 3: No Way Home on Marvel 2021 slate
The superhero franchise has unleashed its roadmap for the future, with dates for the Loki television show and the third Tom Holland Spider-Man film announced.
Spare a thought for Marvel super-producer Kevin Feige, who as head of the company’s film studio oversees every single movie and television show that comes under their umbrella.
He is also a man who likes to plan. Films are plotted out years in advance, in order to sketch the arc of Marvel’s multi-project, multi-character storytelling style. It’s not called the Marvel universe for nothing.
Characters are introduced early that will eventually play greater roles in later films, plot details are seeded into movies that will only much later become truly explained. That’s the Marvel way.
So it can’t have been easy when a year of COVID-19 lockdowns completely uprooted the film industry’s carefully-planned release schedules. There is a method to the Marvel madness, always, which means that there was a reason why certain films and television shows were intended to be released in 2020, including Black Widow and Eternals. But when best laid plans meet a global pandemic most of Marvel’s 2020 slate was ripped from cinemas. Now, with the film company sketching out its 2021 roadmap, their plan for the future is becoming clear.
The first announcement made today is that Loki, Marvel’s long-awaited television series focusing on Thor’s villainous, albeit charming, younger brother has been locked in for June. Starring Tom Hiddleston, reprising his role as Loki, alongside Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Owen Wilson, Loki will follow the antihero as he deals with something called the Time Variance Authority, an organisation that pursues those who have messed with time travel.
The series will drop onto Disney+ from 11 June, the third Marvel television series as part of the company’s new Disney+ era. The first, WandaVision, is streaming weekly on the platform now, with The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, following on 19 March. Later this year, two Marvel series currently in production — Hawkeye and Ms Marvel — are expected to be released.
Ever since Avengers: Endgame was released in 2019, Marvel has made small steps towards shoring up its television offering. Endgame was always intended to be a curtain call of sorts for the company; a chance to bid farewell to a few of the superheroes that had dominated blockbuster films for the past decade.
Spoiler alert, for a movie released in 2019, but Endgame sees the end of Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Captain America (Chris Evans), with the latter passing on his shield to his compatriot Falcon (Anthony Mackie). The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is set just after the events of Endgame, and will see Falcon and Buckie (Sebastian Stan) reckoning with their new place in the world.
Marvel has always made television shows — previously, they were housed on Netflix. But these new Disney+ series are a sign of a shift in focus at the film studio and a new approach to storytelling.
The characters driving these series forward aren’t secondary heroes, such as the ones seen in the Netflix series. These are primary characters and occasionally even fan favourites, in the case of Hiddleston’s Loki. Joke as much as you want about Hawkeye’s skills (or lack thereof), but the man is a literal Avenger. Coming soon to Disney+ will be a She-Hulk miniseries starring Tatiana Maslany and Moon Knight, starring Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke.
“That is part of the fun, exciting, adrenaline-boosting creativity that we’re able to do thanks to Disney+,” Kevin Feige has said. “[We can] really figure out new ways of storytelling and new ways of telling our stories. Perhaps some day we’ll chart out five seasons of a show, but really we’re focusing on delivering the best seasons we can, one at a time.”
It begs the question: where do movies fit into all this? Previously, Marvel would take their time introducing new characters onscreen, allowing them to develop into fan favourites over the course of several movies. This method worked with superheroes including Thor and Star Lord in Guardians of the Galaxy.
But the approach now appears to be focusing on using their Disney+ television series as a launch platform and saving the big screen for major sequels — coming soon to cinemas are a Black Widow standalone film, a Thor sequel currently in production in Sydney, and both Black Panther 2 and Captain Marvel 2. The exceptions to the rule are Marvel’s two big 2021 releases: Shang-Chi, coming to cinemas in July, and Eternals, a multi-character ensemble piece starring Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek and Gemma Chan, which is set for release in November.
And then there’s Marvel and Sony’s co-produced Spider-Man: No Way Home, the third film in Tom Holland and Zendaya’s franchise, which is currently filming in Atlanta. The plot is shrouded in mystery, and there are rumours flying that previous Spider-Men Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield could be making cameos in the film. Even the name of the movie was unclear until today, when Holland and Zendaya confirmed that, despite a little social media trolling, the third film would be called Spider-Man: No Way Home, and not Spider-Man: Phone Home, or Spider-Man: Homeslice.
No matter the title, Holland’s latest Spider-Man movie is set for release on 17 December. Marvel certainly has a very big 2021 ahead of itself.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier premieres on Disney+ on 19 March. Loki premieres on Disney+ from 11 June. Eternals will be released in cinemas on 29 October. Spider-Man: No Way Home will be released in cinemas on 17 December.