Disney Announces 26 New Release Dates, Including Marvel Films Through 2022

Disney already made waves this afternoon when the studio moved Marvel's Avengers: Infinity War up by a week. But that was just an appetizer compared to today's main course: the studio has announced more than two dozen new release dates from now until 2023, including Marvel release dates all the way through 2022. Let's see if we can figure out what some of these are.

Here are all of the Disney release dates they've claimed starting with next year, with the new dates in bold (courtesy of Exhibitor Relations):

That's a lot of untitled movies. Let's try to narrow down what some of these may be. To make it easy, we'll break our speculation into sections.

Let's look at the Marvel release dates first. I'll drop our guesses into the following untitled slots, updated from the last time we guessed about them:

We don't yet know who's going to survive the next two Avengers movies, but since Marvel has historically worked in trilogies, it makes sense that we'd see those franchises filled out for characters like Ant-Man and the Wasp, Black Panther, Captain Marvel, and Doctor Strange. We also know the Marvel Cinematic Universe is going to get more cosmic after Avengers 4, and with Black Widow in the works, hopefully that will do well enough to warrant a sequel of its own.

This is the first year Lucasfilm will be releasing two Star Wars movie in the same year, and even though Rian Johnson is developing a new trilogy and the Game of Thrones creators are working on their own separate series of films, it still may be a few years before they make that pace their new normal. That means we could see something like this:

Here's where things get trickier. There's been at least one live action adaptation of a Disney animated classic for the past few years, and next year will have two with The Lion King and Dumbo. There are 19 Disney live action slots listed on that chart, so it'd be foolish to try to accurately guess every one of them. But we know Peter Pan, Jungle Cruise, The Little Mermaid, Maleficent 2, Pinocchio, Labyrinth, Lady and the Tramp, Disenchanted, Cruella, and The Sword in the Stone are in the works – though a few of those could end up debuting on the studio's new streaming service. Your guess is as good as ours.

Again, this is largely speculation on our part. And frankly, it's kind of terrifying that any studio is releasing a calendar that's this full this early. But it's all about staking claims to dates in order to dominate competition, and other companies are certainly going to think twice about scheduling something against a few of these behemoths. And Disney hasn't even acquired Fox yet. Think about how wild an announcement like this could be in a year or two. *shudders*