Marvel’s lively Comic-Con presentation added two huge comic book movie pillars to Marvel Studios’ 2028 release calendar. They are Black Panther 3, which stars David Johnson in his first role as T’Challa II/Toussaint, and Ghost Rider, which stars Ryan Gosling in the title role. This announcement means that the only Marvel movies to be released in theaters between now and 2028 are Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Avengers: Doomsday, and Avengers: Secret Wars. In fact, Secret Wars is the only Marvel movie to be released in 2027.
“A lot of it is a strategy we’ve been talking about for a while, focusing on quality,” Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige told Empire magazine at Comic-Con about the sparser release schedule. “We always try to focus on quality, but when you have too much quantity, you get diluted. We didn’t want to be diluted, and the Avengers are this important. And ‘Secret Wars’ is… itself a future, a setting for what’s next. So it was really about landing these two movies and setting them in 2028. We’ve released two of them so far, ‘Ghost Rider’ and ‘Panther III.’
With the TV series “Vision Quest” coming to Disney+ in October, the Marvel Cinematic Universe will have a total of four new films in two years. This is a significant slowdown compared to the exhaustive production Marvel has previously delivered in theaters and on streaming. For example, there were six Marvel movie and television projects in 2023 alone. Feige previously admitted to Variety that Marvel’s “over-expansion” into Disney+ streaming content was the beginning of “quantity over quality” at the studio, but he now appears to be actively correcting course.
Former Disney CEO Bob Iger also cited Marvel’s foray into streaming as a reason for the disappointing critical and commercial results from 2023 to 2024, saying, “They’ve never been so big in the TV business.” Not only did we produce more movies, we ended up producing more TV series, but frankly it diluted the focus and attention, and I think that’s what caused it more than anything else.
Marvell is currently reducing production to restore quality. The studio is currently developing a new take on the X-Men, but no release date for the standalone film was announced at Comic-Con. Feige told Empire that Gosling’s Ghost Rider movie moved forward after “It was Gosling who had the vision. It was Gosling who had the pitch to convince Sean. They came to pitch this idea to us, which led to us on stage today.”
Shawn Levy will direct the Ghost Rider movie after working with Gosling on the upcoming Star Wars: Starfighter. Disney owns both the Marvel and Star Wars franchises.
