The COVID-19 pandemic has largely affected people’s lives, including people that work in the movie industry. Marvel Studios and Disney had big plans for 2020 but several movies and series like “Black Widow”, “Eternals”, “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier”, and “WandaVision” got pushed back to 2021 because of the closing of theatres and film production being shut down.  Due to all the cancellations, there are a lot more shows coming out this year than originally planned. 

Disney + has already released a series of shorts called “Legends,” on January 8th. A warning to anyone who hasn’t watched the majority of the Marvel movies, the series is basically a recap of a character’s life in the MCU. Two episodes have already been released about Wanda Maximoff and Vision in preparation for the WandaVision series. Each episode is about seven minutes long and shows all the important moments of a character’s journey and how much they have grown over the years. 

On Friday, January 15th, Disney + is releasing their first Marvel series, WandaVision. They have released many clips of the upcoming show but fans are still unsure of what it is about. Old characters like Darcy Lewis and Monica Rambeau are making a reappearance in the show and never before seen characters are being introduced as well. It is clear that the show will be focusing on Vision and Wanda’s new marriage and how Wanda has a stronger connection with her powers, but the biggest question that fans have is, what happened to Vision? 

Disney + has many more series coming out over the course of the year. “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” will be released March 19th and will show the new relationship between Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes after Sam became the new Captain America. The Loki series will be released in May and will show what happened to him after he stole the tesseract in “Avengers: Endgame” and how he deals with the TVA or the Time Variance Authority. The next series that will be released is “What If…” in the summer of 2021. It’s an animated series that takes the stories of the MCU, changes one aspect of it, and then shows the domino effect of that singular change. The final two series that are planned for late 2021 are “Ms. Marvel” and “Hawkeye”.

Marvel also has several movies planned for this year that are all supposed to tie back into the Disney + series. “Black Widow” is the first movie that will come out May 7th. It was originally supposed to be the first show released in phase four of the MCU but both “WandaVision” and “Falcon and the Winter Soldier” are coming out before that. Next is a movie about a brand new character, “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”, that will be released July 9th. Another completely new movie that will be released is “Eternals” on November 5th and is about ancient beings that have been shaping history as we know it. The final movie planned for 2021 is the third Spider-Man movie, which is speculated to have both Tobey Maguire’s and Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man along with Tom Holland’s version of the web-shooting vigilante.