Credit: Marvel StudiosMarvel has confirmed a “new beginning” for its sprawling almost two-decade-old Marvel Cinematic Universe.
With Captain America: Brave New World (2025) limping its way towards a global $400 million box office haul and Thunderbolts* (2025) ready to wrap up Phase Five, the MCU is on the cusp of change.
It’s no secret that Phase Four and Phase Five have felt haphazard at best, with unconnected movies and a near endless stream of Disney+ content, Marvel seemingly prioritized quantity over quality–something Disney CEO Bob Iger hinted at upon his surprise 2022 return to the House of Mouse.
The MCU’s Phase Four had some highlights, especially considering it began during the global pandemic and movie theater shutdown.
From Spider-Man: No Way Home‘s (2021) $1.953 billion takings at the box office to the launch of Marvel Studios’ streaming content with WandaVision, Phase Four expanded the MCU further than ever before. However, with so much content being delivered, fans quickly switched off and mourned the pre-Avengers: Endgame era of the franchise.
Phase Five didn’t fare any better, either. In fact, the current Phase has some of the lowest-performing MCU movies to date, with features like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023) and The Marvels (2023).
That said, Phase Five also holds one of the highest-grossing MCU movies to date with Shawn Levy’s two-hander Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) starring Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman as the respective eponymous characters.
As for Julius Onah’s Captain America: Brave New World, the movie was always going to struggle considering its muddled production process and casting controversies, but, still, $400 million at the box office may be lower than Marvel needs to post a profit on the pricey flick.
While Thunderbolts* looked promising, the chatter wasn’t that intense until Marvel Studios dropped an unprecedented A24-style trailer for the movie that seems to have reignited interest. Many are already looking ahead to Phase Six which will feature both the debut of Marvel’s First Family, the Fantastic Four, and the return of Robert Downey Jr. as Victor Von Doom/Doctor Doom.
Matt Shakman’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025) arrives in theaters in July and will see Pedro Pascal (Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic), Vanessa Kirby (Sue Storm/Invisible Woman), Ebon Moss-Bachrach (Ben Grimm/Thing), and Joseph Quinn (Johnny Storm/Human Torch). Following that, Avengers: Doomsday (2026) will bring Earth’s Mightiest Heroes back front and center to take on this new threat.
Downey Jr. was confirmed to be returning to Marvel alongside the Russo Brothers at last year’s San Diego Comic-Con. The Russo Brothers, of course, are famed for their dramatic and critically acclaimed Avengers movies, Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019). Now, the brothers–Anthony and Joe–have confirmed a restart for the upcoming MCU.
“What’s compelling about these two new Avengers movies is they’re a beginning. It’s a new beginning,” the directors told Omelete.
“So we told an ending story, now we’re going to tell a beginning story, and then who knows where we’ll go from there. Maybe there’ll be another five years, but I think we just needed that time and perspective to figure out where it needed to go next, and the only thing that brought us back was the right story.”
As The Direct notes, this is an interesting revelation considering one of the main concerns by fans is that there has been no real interconnected lead-up to Avengers: Doomsday, and thus Avengers: Secret Wars, which comes out the year later in May 2027.
It seems that Marvel, instead of using the upcoming Avengers movies to close out a chapter, is using the Phase Six movies to restart the MCU and send it in a new direction.
When looking at this analogy with the film that’s following up Avengers: Doomsday, it makes even more sense. As announced last year, Tom Holland will return for an untitled Spider-Man 4 movie from director Destin Daniel Cretton (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), with the movie expected to show Peter Parker embark on his next chapter after the world forgot who he was.
The MCU’s Spider-Man trilogy director, Jon Watts, previously described the movies as one long origin story, and with Sadie Sink starring alongside Holland potentially as a Multiversal version of Mary Jane Watson, this is looking increasingly like another “new beginning” for the MCU franchise.
How do you feel about this “new beginning” for the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Let Inside the Magic know in the comments down below!