Disney Plus will premiere its live-action Marvel original series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier sometime next year, a months-long delay for the highly anticipated show from its originally planned August release date.
Late Sunday, the show's page in the Disney Plus app included a teaser video for the series, with a caption stating it is "coming in 2021." In July, Disney scrapped the August release for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, what was meant to be the first of its live-action Marvel original series that are knitted directly into the plots and characters from the studio's blockbuster big-screen Marvel movies.
As the coronavirus pandemic shuttered theaters and forced millions to entertain themselves at home, Disney has tweaked Disney Plus' role as a bigger and earlier part of how it releases its big-screen films, with many movies hitting Disney Plus earlier than planned. But the pandemic has also closed down production worldwide, which left big question marks hanging over the release of some of Disney Plus' original shows, particularly the Marvel original series.
The first wave of Marvel originals was initially supposed to kick off The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, starring Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan, in August; WandaVision with Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany was set to follow in December; a Loki series featuring Tom Hiddleston was slated for spring 2021; and a Hawkeye series was aimed for fall 2021, starring Jeremy Renner and featuring Kate Bishop, who in the comics becomes a second Hawkeye.
Now, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier will come out next year, and the release plans for the others are unclear. WandaVision's trailer premiered during the Emmys award telecast Sunday, but Disney hasn't confirmed a release date for the program, saying only that WandaVision is "coming soon."
Long delays to Marvel's big-screen feature films complicate matters too. The plots of Marvel films and the new Marvel series are closely knit. So, for example, WandaVision is supposed to come out in December, and that was designed for Scarlet Witch's storyline to flow right into the May 2021 big-screen release of Doctor Strange: In The Multiverse of Madness. But now, the Doctor Strange sequel has been pushed back nearly a year until March 2022. That raises questions about WandaVision's timing beyond simple production delays.
