Disney has announced that Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels will swap release dates, with the third instalment of Ant-Man taking back its original release date of February 17, 2023, while The Marvels moves to July 28, 2023. This creates questions about future projects, more specifically Ms. Marvel, Secret Invasion, and Loki Season 2.
‘Ms. Marvel’
Kamala Khan, aka Ms. Marvel, is set to make her MCU debut in her own Disney+ series, Ms. Marvel, with The Marvels set to be a partial continuation of her story along with Captain Marvel and Monica Rambeau. While Ms. Marvel is set to release on June 8, 2022, there are still questions that arise from The Marvels‘ delay.
Originally, there would have only been an eight-month gap between Ms. Marvel and The Marvels which begs the question, can we wait that long? It’s not unusual for Marvel to have a large gap of time between a character’s introduction and them reappearing in another project but with over a year to wait now, will audiences remember where her story leaves off? Of course, we know very little about the series or the film at the moment so they may not be as interconnected as we may think.
Another question that begs an answer is, because of this delay, will Marvel place Kamala Khan in another project prior to The Marvels to keep her fresh in our minds? While we last saw Monica Rambeau in WandaVision and Captain Marvel in the mid-credit scene of Shang-Chi and The Legend of the Ten Rings, we can speculate that they will both make an appearance in Ms. Marvel. Since this will be Kamala Khan’s introduction, they may want to place her in another project sooner, such as Secret Invasion, rumored to be linked to The Marvels as well. Although Secret Invasion has recently wrapped shooting, there is always time for reshoots or even a post-credit scene.
‘Secret Invasion’
While the Disney+ series Secret Invasion currently has no release date, it has long been rumored to debut before The Marvels as it is also rumored to be connected to the film. Nick Fury is set to star as well as Ben Mendelsohn who is reprising his role as the skrull Talos, who we first saw in Captain Marvel. Does this have any affect on either project?
Because Secret Invasion is allegedly tied to The Marvels, it was speculated that it would debut on Disney+ in late 2022 to early 2023 before The Marvels‘ original release date of February 17, 2023. However, now that this has changed, it is possible that we might see Secret Invasion not debut until Spring/Summer 2023.
‘Loki’ Season 2
Loki Season 2 is where things get most interesting. In the last episode of Season 1, we meet He Who Remains, who we then later learn to be a variant of Kang The Conqueror (played by Jonathan Majors). Sylvie, a variant of Loki, eventually kills He Who Remains, but at the end of the episode, we see that a statue of one of his variants has replaced the Time-Keepers’ statue in the new timeline of the TVA. What does any of this have to do with anything?
Kang The Conqueror is set to appear in Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, presumably as the main villain. Season 2 of Loki was speculated to set up the future of He Who Remains/Kang The Conqueror, but with Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania now debuting only ten months away, that won’t be possible.
Although we can assume that the creatives behind Loki were made aware of this change before the general public, with filming to begin in a little over a month, we wonder if any major changes had to be made to the overall story of Season 2. With any luck, they were able to change things early, or maybe the story would have had little to do with the Ant-Man plot.
Do you think this swap will have any major effect on future projects?
