The Walt Disney Company held their investor day conference for 2020. During the four-hour event, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy announced several new Star Wars series for Disney+, as well as the next film:
– Rangers of the New Republic and Ahsoka, series that will culminate into a crossover event with The Mandalorian.
– Star Wars: Visions, an anime anthology series from top Japanese animators.
– Lando, a series from Dear White People creator Justin Simien. (It was not mentioned if Solo: A Star Wars Story star Donald Glover will reprise the role.)
– The Acolyte, Russian Doll co-creator Leslye Headland’s show, which will delve into the dark side during the final days of the High Republic.
– A Droid Story, an animated film co-produced by Lucasfilm Animation and Industrial Light & Magic, starring R2-D2, C-3PO, and a new hero.
– Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, the next theatrical film, which will focus on the titular Rebel X-wing unit. Due out December 2023, it will be directed by Wonder Woman‘s Patty Jenkins, who will be the first woman to direct a Star Wars feature.
— Patty Jenkins (@PattyJenks) December 10, 2020
Kennedy also stated Tony Gilroy’s Cassian Andor series will be simply titled Andor, and that Hayden Christensen will return as Darth Vader for the Obi-Wan Kenobi series; she also said Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi’s film project was being prioritized. The first footage from the animated Clone Wars spin-off The Bad Batch was also shown, and Kennedy also announced that the Disney+ Willow series, James Mangold’s Indiana Jones 5 (out July 2022), and the 20th Century co-production Children of Blood and Bone (based on Tomi Adeyemi’s novel) were in pre-production.
Kevin Feige introduced all of Marvel Studios’ projects through to 2023:
– WandaVision received its second official trailer, spotlighting Kathryn Hahn as Agnes (commonly theorized to be the witch Agatha Harkness), Randall Park’s return as Jimmy Woo, Kat Dennings’s return as Darcy Lewis, and Teyonah Parris’s debut as Monica Rambeau (one of the heroes to bear the title of Captain Marvel). The six-episode series, starring Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany, begins January 15 2021.
– Xochitl Gomez, who was previously cast in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, was confirmed to play America Chavez, the dimension-hopping Young Avenger. The film will also feature the returns of Benedict Wong, Rachel McAdams and Chiwetel Ejiofor, with a cameo appearance by Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch. Feige confirmed the film would tie into both WandaVision and the upcoming sequel to Spider-Man: Far From Home. Seeing as the film is directed by original Spider-Man trilogy creator Sam Raimi, it seems that Doctor Strange’s multiversal meanderings could land him in some familiar film universes. The film will release March 25, 2022.
– Falcon and the Winter Soldier got a new trailer, confirming a March 19 debut. In addition to Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan, Emily VanCamp and Daniel Brühl’s returns, we will see the debut of Wyatt Russell as John Walker. The trailer featured the masked antagonists, the Flag Smashers, bearing a symbol with an uncanny similarity to the chalk handprint of the superhero Echo, who is set to be played by Alaqua Cox in Hawkeye.
– Black Widow now has a May 17, 2021 theatrical release date.
– The Loki Disney+ series got its first full trailer, starring Tom Hiddleston as the alternate-timeline Loki from the Battle of New York in Avengers: Endgame. He will be butting heads with the Time Variance Authority (TVA), with Owen Wilson (as Mobius M. Mobius) and Gugu Mbatha-Raw both playing members of the Authority. Loki’s Tesseract travellings seem to lead to a variety of time-displaced styles and locales including the Mongolian desert, a Roxxcart facility and a destroyed planet. Loki himself has a great degree of variety, seeming to become DB Cooper, the real-life 1970s plane bandit, as well as taking on his “Vote Loki” outfit from the 2016 comic by Christopher Hastings, Langdon Foss and Paul McCaffrey. The series is set to begin in May 2021 and will also feature Wunmi Mosaku.
– The animated anthology What If…? got its own trailer, showcasing Jeffrey Wright as The Watcher, guiding viewers through a variety of hypothetical alternative Marvel worlds. The ten-episode series will debut in mid 2021 and will feature spectacles like Peggy Carter with the super soldier serum, T’Challa as Star Lord (likely making this Chadwick Boseman’s last ever acting role), a Marvel Zombies world with the Winter Soldier as a living protagonist, and Doctor Strange fighting a mirror-dimension version of himself. A wide variety of other Marvel characters will appear, voiced by their original actors.
Continued below– Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings will hit theatres on July 9, 2021.
– The production team behind Ms. Marvel spoke about the new series, which will release in Late 2021. The series will feature directors Adil El Arbi, Bilall Fallah, Meera Menon and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy.
– Iman Vellani’s Ms. Marvel will go on to appear in Captain Marvel 2 along with Teyonah Parris’s Monica Rambeau when it releases on November 11 2022. As previously announced, Nia DaCosta will direct.
– We got our first footage of Hailee Steinfeld as Kate Bishop/Hawkeye, who will make her first appearance in the Hawkeye Disney+ series.
– For She-Hulk, Tatiana Maslany was confirmed to star as Jennifer Walters/She-Hulk, alongside returning stars Tim Roth as Emil Blonsky/Abomination, and Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner/Hulk. The Disney+ show will be directed by Kat Coiro and Anu Valia.
– The rumored Nick Fury Disney+ series was identified as Secret Invasion, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Ben Mendelsohn (returning as the Skrull Talos). The Disney+ series will adapt the Marvel event by Brian Michael Bendis and Leinil Francis Yu, in which Skrull refugees infiltrated and sought to conquer Earth’s heroes and institutions.
– Ironheart will be getting her own Disney+ series, with Dominique Thorne starring as the teen prodigy superhero who takes over from Tony Stark’s Iron Man after he passes away. The character was co-created by Brian Michael Bendis and Mike Deodato, and went on to be written by Eve L. Ewing and Kevin Libranda.
– The next Disney+ Iron Man adjacent series will be Armor Wars, starring Don Cheadle as James Rhodes/War Machine dealing with the fallout of Tony Stark’s Iron Man arsenal being claimed by a malignant party. The original 1980s comic was made by David Michelinie, Bob Layton, Mark D. Bright and Barry Windsor-Smith.
– James Gunn will be writing and directing The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, a Disney+ special releasing 2022 that will be shot at the same time as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. (now due out 2023).
– Baby Groot will also be starring in a series of quick shorts in the Disney+ series I Am Groot. Kevin Feige teased that a weird and wide variety of Marvel characters will pop up from episode to episode. No release date was given.
– Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder is now slated for a May 6, 2022 release date and will feature Academy Award-winner Christian Bale as Gorr the God Butcher, the main antagonist from Jason Aaron and Esad Ribic’s “Thor: God of Thunder.”
– Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther II is set to release July 8, 2022. Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther will not be recast.
– Peyton Reed will be returning to direct Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, a sequel to the two prior Ant-Man films that will recast Kathryn Newton as Cassie Lang. She will be joining returning stars Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer, as well as the new addition of Jonathan Majors as Kang the Conqueror.
– Spider-Man: Homecoming director Jon Watts will be directing a Fantastic 4 film after the upcoming Spider-Man sequel.
In other news, Disney announced Star, which will act as a substitute for Hulu outside the U.S. — subscribers will have to pay the equivalent of $2 extra to access the locked adult-aimed content, including films like Logan, Die Hard and Alien. The extension is named after the company’s Indian streaming service, Disney+ Hotstar. The tier will presumably be the overseas home of shows like Y: The Last Man, a logo for which was briefly shown during FX on Hulu’s presentation.
Among the film spin-offs announced by Walt Disney Animation Studios for Disney+ by were Baymax!. Out early 2022, the CG-animated Big Hero 6 series will emphasize the robot’s medical programming. They also announced Iwájú, a co-production with pan-African entertainment company Kugali (founded by comic book creators Fikayo Adeola, Hamid Ibrahim and Tolu Olowofoyeku). Also due out in 2022, the sci-fi series is set in Lagos, Nigeria.
For more from Disney today, click on the Twitter thread below:
Continued belowCome one, come all to #DisneyInvestorDay! Expect major announcements from the worlds of @DisneyAnimation, @Pixar, @MarvelStudios, @StarWars, @NatGeo, @DisneyPlus, and more. Follow this thread for live updates starting at 4:30 p.m. ET / 1:30 p.m. PT today! pic.twitter.com/Duh0KHcojG
— Disney (@Disney) December 10, 2020
