Disney's Investor Day meeting on Dec. 11 unleashed a whopping four hours of announcements about upcoming content. Much of the focus was on Marvel's continued expansion in Disney+ TV series and movies.
Let's break down the biggest teases. Marvel announced three new live-action shows, bringing the total we know about to 10. We're already eagerly anticipating "WandaVision" (Jan. 15), "Falcon & Winter Soldier" (March 19), "Loki" (May 2021), "Hawkeye," "She-Hulk" (Tatiana Maslany as Jennifer Walters confirmed), "Ms. Marvel" (Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan confirmed) and "Moon Knight."
And we actually kind of knew about one of the new shows; a series starring Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) has been mentioned before. But it's not going to be "Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D." — instead it's an adaptation of one of Marvel's most famous crossovers, "Secret Invasion." In the comics, "Secret Invasion" involves evil Skrulls capturing and impersonating various powerful people on Earth, especially superheroes, especially Avengers, in order to conquer the planet.
But in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Skrulls are sympathetic refugees, hounded by the Kree. Their leader Talos is friends with both Fury and Captain Marvel (Brie Larson). Will he go bad? Is there another sect of Skrulls that will pull off the infiltration, pitting Skrull against Skrull? Will it be revealed that some dead Avengers were Skrulls at the time? (Opening the door for characters like Black Widow and Quicksilver to return.)
The second new show is "Ironheart," adapting the character Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) from the comics, a genius teenager who reverse-engineers her own Iron Man suit, and wears it with Tony Stark's blessing. Speaking of Stark, in the comics he polices the use of his Iron Man technology — sometimes extralegally. On two occasions, Stark went on global missions to destroy all tech and computer records using his inventions, making him an outlaw. (He got forgiven, somehow.) These two story lines were called "Armor Wars," which is the third new TV series, starring James "War Machine" Rhodes (Don Cheadle).
As if that weren't enough, Marvel had tons of movie announcements.
For example, Christian Bale will portray Gorr the God-Butcher in "Thor: Love and Thunder." Gorr is the butcher who makes sure Asgardians get proper cuts of meat at the supermarket. Ha ha! Just kidding. He kills gods. Like Thor.
The third Ant-Man movie was announced, "Quantumania," which will include all the original cast, plus Kathryn Newton as a now-grown-up Cassie Lang, who will likely join the growing (and shrinking) family business as the superhero Stature. They'll face off with Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors), an Avengers-level threat unlikely to be thwarted by a bunch of ants.
A new stab at "Fantastic Four" was announced, which had me swooning (but my wife rolling her eyes). We also got our first word about two new animated shows, the "Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special" for 2022 and "I Am Groot," a series of film shorts.
These shows are scratching itches I didn't know I had.
