With the ongoing writers' strike impacting development and shooting dates for films across Hollywood, Disney has now announced a huge swathe of release date changes for Marvel, Avatar and other movies.
Marvel, of course, has been delaying some of its films' production and that is having a domino effect for the highly connected cinematic universe. Captain America: Brave New World is moving from May 2024 to 26 August next year, which pushes Thunderbolts to 20 December 2024, Blade to 14 February 2025, and Fantastic Four to 2 May 2025.
That knock-on effect means that Avengers: The Kang Dynasty will be bumped back a year, to 1 May 2026, inheriting the release date for follow-up Avengers: Secret Wars, which itself is on the move to 7 May 2027.
Avatar fans, already well used to the waiting game, will see their patience tested further, since Avatar 3 has moved to 19 December 2025, Avatar 4 to 21 December 2029 and Avatar 5 all the way to 19 December 2031! which means the apparent final movie will land 22 years after the original 2009 film. Yikes.
It's not all delays, though; Deadpool 3, which is in production, will move up from its original 8 November 2024 date to May 3 of that year.
And if you were starting to wonder when we might ever see a new Star Wars movie, then there's good news. 2026 will see two movies from Lucasfilm, one on 22 May, 2026 and another set for the more traditional recent slot of 18 December that year. A third film is reportedly headed our way on 17 December 2027. Disney has yet to clarify any details of which of its in-development Star Wars films are taking those berths, but we can assume one is the Rey follow-up starring Daisy Ridley which has Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy in the director's chair and was confirmed at Star Wars Celebration. On the basis of that, we can also predict that Dave Filoni's film and possibly James Mangold's might be in the other two slots.
And there are also dates on the calendar now for films that didn't have them previously – the live-action Moana is set to surface on 27 June 2025, while Fede Álvarez' film set in the Alien universe is arriving on 16 August next year. Espionage thriller The Amateur, starring Rami Malek, is set for November next year.