The MCU Just Cancelled The Release Of Three Movies. What Does This Mean For Marvel Going Forward?

The MCU has slowly morphed from a straightforward and linear timeline into one of those corkboards that conspiracy theorists use to find Bigfoot.

Red strings radiate toward every corner of the board, delineating alternate universes that feature multiple versions of every character. The Snap is portrayed by flipping over the corkboard and continuing the strings on the other side. There is also a second, smaller corkboard, held in another building — not to represent any logical jump in the story, but because the MCU architects ran out of room and tbh forgot that it existed. It just features three large photos of Charlize Theron, Hercules, and Harry Styles.

But things might get a lot more streamlined soon, because Marvel has removed three MCU projects from its schedule, in addition to postponing the release dates for Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars.

Here’s why this might benefit the MCU.

Time to pump the brakes

Phases One through Three of the MCU worked in unison, building towards a satisfying conclusion that incorporated every character that had been introduced. But since Avengers: Endgame, the MCU has felt like a grab-bag of characters and storylines designed to bombard viewers with entertainment. The result has been an oversaturation of movies and series that convolute the overall MCU storyline and even contradict each other. In other words, the MCU has tiptoed into “quantity over quality” territory.

By pushing back the releases of Doomsday and Secret Wars, Marvel may be allowing audiences to recover from “Marvel fatigue” and grow to appreciate the brand again. Critics aren’t the only ones who have noticed the MCU’s decline in quality, and audiences might need time away from it to realize what they’re missing. It’s not a breakup, just a break.

Mastering the multiverse

There was once a time when the Multiverse Saga felt like an inevitably ambitious culmination of the MCU’s increasingly complex storytelling. However, whoever at Marvel oversaw those corkboards seems to have lost the plot, literally, because the MCU has become quite unwieldy. Storylines have faded into the background; timelines have blended; and eagle-eyed culture writers are starting to tally up the plot holes. This calls for a reset.

That’s where the removal of the three MCU movie releases comes into play. Two movies that were set for February and November 2026, and one that was set for November 2027, have been wiped from the schedule entirely. In their schedule, they were listed as “Untitled Marvel,” but the speculation is that the canceled projects had Blade and Shang-Chi 2 among them. This means that the only upcoming MCU movies slated for release are The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and of course the two Avengers movies. Considering that Thunderbolts has already hinted at a team-up between those antiheroes and the Fantastic Four prior to Doomsday, it’s clearer now where the MCU is headed. And Brand New Day is unlikely to complicate matters, given that the movie will supposedly home in on Spider-Man’s quest to rehabilitate his reputation in NYC. Meanwhile, the MCU’s planned Disney+ series will highlight characters that are tangential enough to not affect the universe’s main plotlines. Ironheart, Wonder Man, and Eyes of Wakanda will reportedly tell mostly self-contained stories.

Essentially, we’re inching closer to a straightforward culminating boss fight à la Avengers: Infinity War and Thanos, but with a new big boss — Dr. Doom — and a slightly different roster of characters.

And who are those characters, exactly?

The good ones! Mostly.

In an almost horrendously long March 2025 livestream, Marvel Studios revealed its cast for Avengers: Doomsday in bombastic fashion. In addition to featuring the Thunderbolts, a.k.a. The New Avengers, the capstone film will count the Fantastic Four, the Fox-era X-Men cast, and the cast of Captain America: Brave New World among its promising team. Even though the latter movie wasn’t as well-received by critics (or audiences), this planned team at least narrows the MCU’s gargantuan ambitions to something more attainable (and easy to follow). And presumably, much of the cast of Doomsday will survive until Secret Wars; and with only Spider-Man taking place between Doomsday and Secret Wars, Marvel fans won’t have to worry about the MCU getting any more convoluted in the meantime.

Ultimately, Marvel’s decision to clean up its release timeline is not the sign of a franchise in decline. It’s a smart business move designed to reinvigorate the MCU’s street cred and return to what Marvel does best: Distract us all from the impending doom of civilization.