Tag Archives: Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase Four

Thor Love and Thunder Trailer Taika Waititi, Hemsworth, Portman

Say hello to the Mighty Thor.
Gif: Marvel Studios

After Thor: Ragnarok, fans obviously expected Thor: Love and Thunder to be wild. Just off-the-walls bonkers nonsense from the man who does that better than anyone: writer-director Taika Waititi. Now, the first trailer is here, and it delivers on that promise and more. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is, indeed, bringing the thunder. And we love it.

Thor: Love and Thunder opens July 8 in theaters only. It brings back Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Tessa Thompson as Valkyrie, and Natalie Portman as Jane Foster, as well as all of the Guardians of the Galaxy, Oscar winners Christian Bale and Russell Crowe, and a whole lot more. Many of which you see right here in this incredible trailer.

When last we saw the God of Thunder, he’d left New Asgard in the capable hands of Valkyrie, and set off back into the cosmos with the Guardians of the Galaxy at the end of Avengers: Endgame. As you can see this movie picks up from there and goes into places we’d never expect. Well, except for that whole Jane Foster becoming the Mighty Thor thing—that was revealed waaaay back at San Diego Comic-Con 2019 when Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige laid out the plan for Phase 4. At that time, Thor: Love and Thunder was one of the last entries. Now it’s finally coming and it will, from what we can tell, certainly be setting things up for the future.

Oh, and isn’t it wild that Thor: Love and Thunder is the first fourth Marvel Studios character movie? The Avengers got four movies but Iron Man and Captain America only got three. Does that make Thor the current crown jewel of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Or is it just that Marvel couldn’t say no to another Waititi movie when he basically has his choice of projects, including Star Wars? Probably a bit of both. In the meantime, check out a new poster for the movie too.

Image: Marvel Studios

Tell us what you think of the trailer below. Love and Thunder opens July 8.


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New Doctor Strange 2 trailer reveals another WandaVision link

After breaking open the multiverse in Spider-Man: No Way Home, Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) appears to be finding out that totally warping reality has its consequences. In this new promotional video for Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness, the master of the mystic arts is in way over his head–but does he even remember why?

Doctor Strange hasn’t had a solo movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe since his titular debut in 2016, but the character has popped up in a slew of other projects since then, hinting at the further development of his mind-bending powers. Sorcerer Supreme Wong (Benedict Wong), friend-turned-foe Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and former co-worker/ex-girlfriend Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams) all make their returns for the sequel.

Directed by Sam Raimi, Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness is set to be the first feature film to seriously engage with plot points from the MCU’s Disney+ shows, after Eternals and Spider-Man: No Way Home kept the references to a minimum. In previously unseen footage, Wanda Maximoff, aka the Scarlet Witch, reunites with the twin sons she conjured during the events of WandaVision, though it doesn’t seem to last long–at least for now.

While the MCU’s most famous magic users are teaming up, they’ll have to worry about the zombie versions of themselves, depicted in animated form in an episode of What If…? and seen making their live-action debut here. Another sinister variant of Strange is revealed to be sprouting a literal third eye.

Another video featuring the cast announcing ticket sales offers a better look at new character America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez, The Baby-Sitters Club), whose super-powered punches allow her to jump through different timelines. The movie’s roster of heroes is also set to include a mysterious glowing person and Patrick Stewart as Professor X, probably?

Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness will be released in theaters on May 6.

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Doctor Strange 2 Teaser Hints at Wanda’s Kids, New Villains

Marvel has released a new trailer for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The previous trailers gave us some hints at the supporting cast surrounding the good (and, possibly, evil Doctor), and this release adds a new wrinkle: Wanda Maximoff’s children from WandaVision make an appearance. There’s only one small problem… they were never actually real.

The multiverse has been the focus of multiple Marvel properties over the past few years, and it’s not a stretch to say that Endgame kicked it off with its own brand of time fuckery. There was a little bit towards the end of WandaVision, a lot of it in Loki, and nonstop fanservice meta-narrative multiverse storytelling in Spider-Man: No Way Home.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness trailer

After the No Way Home final scenes revealed the full extent of the multiverse gone sideways, fans began eagerly awaiting the trailers for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Now, with nearly three trailer drops since the superbowl, we can see that the multiverse depends on Doctor Strange, Scarlet Witch, Wong, and Ms. America. They’ll all be fighting their worst fears, and the worst versions of themselves. There’s also some hints of the multi-villains they’ll be after, and while nobody’s been confirmed, there is a hint of Captain Marvel’s classic colorscheme of yellow-highlights-with-blue-glowy-hands.

There’s a ton of hints in the sets here too—the Sanctum in rubble, the creeping darkness towards Kamar-Taj, Wanda breaking down in a vision of her suburban home of Westview, we even get a glimpse of a science lab with ultron-bots running around, as well as images of a strange, broken-up world… possibly a broken universe, or maybe just a waypoint?

Directed by Sam Raimi and written by Loki’s Michael Waldron, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Elizabeth Olsen, Benedict Wong, Xochitl Gomez, Michael Stühlbarg, and Rachel McAdams. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness hits theaters May 6.


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Eternals buries Dune at the weekend box office

Eternals
Photo: Marvel Studios

Apparently there’s still some juice in this Marvel Cinematic Universe thing, huh? Who could’ve seen that coming? In case you can’t tell, this is sarcasm. After all, Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings stands as one of the most successful movies of this nightmare pandemic era we’ll be living in forever, so it seems like Marvel movies are still going to be big no matter what—provided you don’t release them day-and-date on Disney+, which (at least for a Marvel movie) is a bit of a box office killer.

But we’re not talking about Shang-Chi here, we’re talking about Chloé Zhao’s Eternals, which opened to an impressive $71 million this weekend. Possibly indicating that reviews (and global pandemics) don’t really matter to Marvel fans when it comes to opening weekends, the movie is on pace to make a ton of cash both domestically and globally.

That $71 million take is also more than enough to utterly destroy all of the competition, with Dune dropping to second in its third week with only $7.6 million. It’s made nearly $84 million, so it’s doing okay, but it probably won’t catch No Time To Die and Venom: Let There Be Carnage (which made $6 million and $4 million, respectively, bringing them to $143 million and $197 million). That parenthetical means that, yes, this is yet another week where we get to hem and haw about whether or not a second movie will cross $200 million this year. It should, but who knows?!

Moving down the list, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch is actually moving up the list, expanding to 417 more theaters and making about the same amount of money it made last week, but that was enough to lift it from 10 to six on the charts. Halloween Kills fell hard, as you might expect since the spooky season is over, and Kristen Stewart’s Spencer debuted modestly with $2.1 million on a limited rollout.

Of course, true fans know that the real battle this week was between Antlers and Last Night In Soho, the Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen of box office charts (if Hamilton and Verstappen were fighting over last place). The two movies opened with the same amount of money last week, and this week they remain relatively neck-and-neck: Antlers made a cool $2 million, while Soho fell back to $1.8 million. Nothing that can’t be overcome, especially with Soho’s wider rollout, but we look forward to keeping an eye on this thrilling battle for weeks to come.

As always, this data comes from Box Office Mojo. Head over there to see a more detailed breakdown of the numbers. The full top 10 is below.

  1. Eternals
  2. Dune
  3. No Time To Die
  4. Venom: Let There Be Carnage
  5. Ron’s Gone Wrong
  6. The French Dispatch
  7. Halloween Kills
  8. Spencer
  9. Antlers
  10. Last Night In Soho

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Post-Credits Scene Reveals Disney+ Future

Loki (Sophia Di Martino) and Loki (Tom Hiddleston).
Photo: Disney

This week’s Loki season finale on Disney+ was full of twists and turns, and a very conspicuous apple. But the biggest surprise of all may have been saved for the very end.

Loki’s story isn’t over yet. Marvel revealed in the mid-credits scene of “For All Time. Always.” that the Disney+ series would be coming back for season two, making it the first Marvel Cinematic Universe show to be officially approved for more than one season. The news explains why the finale gave us far more questions than answers, ending on a cliffhanger that perhaps not even Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness could solve. This reveal came after Lovecraft Country’s Jonathan Majors made his MCU debut as Kang (though not quite the Conquerer version we’ll see in the upcoming Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania).

The MCU entered the realm of Disney+ television shows with two limited series, WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier—both of which have been nominated for several awards at this year’s Emmy Awards. It was believed that the six-episode season of Loki would follow suit, with the story of Tom Hiddleston’s Loki and Sophia Di Martino’s Sylvie setting up the final puzzle pieces for Phase 4 of the MCU. This phase is set to go places, with projects like the upcoming Doctor Strange sequel, the cameo-filled Spider-Man 3: Far From Home, Disney+’s What If…?, and Quantumania taking us everywhere and everywhen in the multiverse. While that is still true (more on that in our recap later), that doesn’t mean the Time Variance Authority—or Mobius (Owen Wilson) and his lost-in-time jet ski—are going anywhere anytime soon.

Loki season two will join an ever-growing number of Disney+ shows currently in development. They include Ironheart, She-Hulk, and Ms. Marvel, which will introduce Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany), and Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) to the MCU. That’s only the tip of the iceberg for the future of the MCU—lest we forget, the Fantasic Four is coming. Hopefully, third time’s the charm on that one.

The first season of Loki ended on Wednesday. No planned production or release date for season two has been announced yet. We’ll bring you more as we know it.


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Black Widow/Falcon and Winter Soldier Link: One Covid Change

Natasha Romanoff, on the hunt for Mephisto. Maybe.
Image: Marvel Studios

Marvel gets a lot of credit—perhaps too much credit—for the idea that its cinematic universe is meticulously laid out years in advance, a grand plan that we and it alike are pulled along with as if by inevitability more so than the planning power of a studio worth billions of dollars. But given the last 18 months and counting that the world has had, surely some of that planning has been put askew? Only a tiny bit, apparently, according to Kevin Feige.

Speaking to On The Red Carpet for the premiere of Black Widow—a film that was originally meant to kick off Marvel’s “Phase 4” plans before the pandemic saw it delayed multiple times—Feige discussed Marvel Studio’s general reaction to the impact covid-19 has had on its rollout. Beyond Black Widow, films like The Eternals and Shang-Chi have been pushed back along with the rest of Disney’s calendar for the next year or two, but the company has managed to leverage the arrival of its Disney+ shows—WandaVision, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and the currently ongoing Loki, all of which Widow was meant to release ahead of—to fill the gap between its movie releases.

But that’s relatively minor shuffling, all things considered. It’s only really Widow’s delayed release that’s largely changed what we knew to expect out of Marvel’s post-Endgame catalogue so far, and according to Feige, all that’s largely impacted is the early reveal of one connection between the movie and the Disney+ shows. “There’s also an Easter egg that originally was going to appear first in Black Widow, and then show up in Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and because of the pandemic—it’s the only thing within our Phase 4 that was twisted a little bit,” Feige explained. “So for fans that watched Falcon and the Winter Soldier, there’s something waiting for them as an Easter egg in this film.”

That Easter egg had already been reported by Vanity Fair to have been the arrival of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Valentina Allegra de Fontaine. She’s a character from the comics with links to a whole Rolodex’s worth of the publisher’s spy-fi secret organizations—from SHIELD to Hydra (she was, for a time, the owner of the Madame Hydra mantle), to perhaps most likely connected to Black Widow itself, the former Soviet spy cell Leviathan (which previously appeared in Agent Carter). Given that de Fontaine’s plans are still relatively nebulous to us as an audience, outside of the fact that we know she’s teamed up with Wyatt Russell’s John Walker, aka the U.S. Agent, in the present, meeting her in Falcon before Widow likely doesn’t have all that much of an impact. Perhaps the fact that Feige claims it’s the only major reshuffle in the studio’s plans for Phase 4 makes it all the more impressive.


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