Disney Announces The Release Dates For Three Upcoming Marvel Shows

By Brian Richards | TV | May 15, 2024 |

By Brian Richards | TV | May 15, 2024 |

Over the last several months, Marvel Studios has been doing all that they can to get themselves out of their current Flop Era, which has seen Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, The Marvels, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, and Secret Invasion receive mixed reviews, disappointing box-office returns, and unhappy fans expressing their anger and disappointment on the Internet about the current state of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (Including the fact that Marvel and Disney chose not to recast the role of T’Challa after the death of Chadwick Boseman.) That anger and disappointment have contributed to numerous articles being written about “superhero movie fatigue,” and whether comic book movies are now a fad that no longer appeal to audiences the way they once did. Disney CEO Bob Iger revealed that Marvel Studios is reducing the number of films and television shows that will be released each year while also stating that some upcoming projects weren’t up to snuff and have been canceled as a result. (Armor Wars, perhaps?)

As for what Marvel Studios is doing right now in 2024? Deadpool & Wolverine will be the only MCU film released in theaters this year, and by the time you read this, X-Men ‘97 will have aired its season finale after receiving near-unanimous praise from critics and viewers who consider it to possibly be the best X-Men adaptation ever made.

The Disney upfronts were held at the North Javits Center in New York City yesterday afternoon. Jimmy Kimmel was there to crack jokes and take shots at business decisions made by Disney. (“Bob Iger should be retired by now, he should be off on a yacht somewhere. Instead, he’s here pretending to be excited about a new season of Will f-cking Trent”), as well as their competitors. (“CBS also announced this will be the 14th and final season of Blue Bloods. Those assholes. Your grandpa has one thing left to live for.”) But the Disney upfronts also included a few announcements about their upcoming projects, including three of the upcoming Marvel shows premiering on Disney Plus.

Agatha All Along, the WandaVision spin-off starring Kathryn Hahn as Agatha Harkness, will premiere with two episodes on September 18th, with the rest of the season’s episodes airing weekly. Marvel and Disney’s social media accounts also used the announcement to poke fun at all of the alleged name changes that Agatha All Along has gone through during its production, even as recently as yesterday when it was announced that Agatha All Along was going to be called Agatha: The Lying Witch with the Great Wardrobe. Some fans didn’t get that the subtitle was a pun on C.S. Lewis’ classic fantasy novel The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, and others were too busy rolling their eyes to even care about the upcoming show’s existence, let alone about its name change.

It was Agatha All Along 🔮

Don’t miss the two-episode premiere of #AgathaAllAlong, September 18 on @DisneyPlus. pic.twitter.com/hwPSOeJFv6

— Marvel Studios (@MarvelStudios) May 14, 2024

The #WandaVision Instagram account has shared a video of all the past titles for the Disney+ #Agatha series.

It’s been ‘AGATHA ALL ALONG’… pic.twitter.com/JeRyrXbLgF

— Cosmic Marvel (@cosmic_marvel) May 14, 2024

The cast for Agatha All Along also includes Aubrey Plaza, Sasheer Zamata, Emma Caulfield Ford, Joe Locke, Ali Ahn, Debra Jo Rupp, and Patti LuPone.

[The teaser for Agatha All Along] opened with Agatha Harkness not as the witch we saw in WandaVision, but as a detective struggling with a murder case. As she glances at a list of dates, next to October 13, a familiar name appears: “W. Maximoff.”

Aubrey Plaza’s character appears after that, asking Agatha, “Is this really how you see yourself?”

“That witch is gone, leaving you in a distorted spell,” Plaza says. “Claw your way out.”

We then see Agatha snap out of it, saying, “She took every bit of power had. I can be that witch again.”

What follows are a number of eerie, witchy sequences as Agatha vows to walk the Witch’s Road and build her coven. Then, we get a quick look at Patti LuPone’s character.

“What witch in her right mind would join Agatha Harkness’ coven?” LuPone says.

Agatha gasps and responds, “I’m not looking for right-minded witches.

Daredevil: Born Again, which kicked its original showrunners to the curb, scrapped half of its 18-episode season, and hired new writers, directors, and showrunners to start fresh and make Marvel and Disney happy, will premiere in March of 2025. The cast includes Charlie Cox (Matt Murdock/Daredevil), Vincent D’Onofrio (Wilson Fisk/Kingpin), Deborah Ann Woll (Karen Page), Elden Henson (Franklin “Foggy” Nelson), Jon Bernthal (Frank Castle/The Punisher), Ayelet Zurer (Vanessa Fisk), Wilson Bethel (Benjamin Poindexter/Bullseye), Margarita Levieva, Nikki M. James, Michael Gandolfini, and Clark Johnson. (The last three actors were cast before Marvel and Disney decided to hit the RESET button on the series, so it remains to be seen whether those casting decisions remained intact, or if their roles were diminished.)

The new trailer [for Daredevil: Born Again], which has not been released as of publication, shows Matt Murdock donning the iconic Daredevil suit while narrating that the “entire system is against you… it’s often David vs. Goliath.” It includes among other things, glimpses of Kingpin, Foggy, and Karen, the latter two who were confirmed to be returning earlier this year. At the end of the trailer, following a brief action sequence, Murdock is asked: “What kind of a lawyer are you?”

“A really good one,” he quips as he puts on a broken pair of his familiar glasses.

Some fans who loved the first three seasons that originally aired on Netflix have not been shy in hoping that when The Man Without Fear returns once more to headlining his own series, his characterization will be more like how it was on Netflix, and what we glimpsed in the first episode of Echo, and absolutely nothing like what was done on She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. (To those fans who hated how Matt/Daredevil was portrayed in the series, and who really didn’t like seeing him do the Walk of Shame after sleeping with Jennifer/She-Hulk, I have this to say…)

Ironheart is scheduled to premiere sometime in 2025, with no exact date revealed yet. It stars Dominique Thorne as Riri Williams, a brilliant inventor/MIT student who was introduced in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and who created her own suit of Iron Man armor, which was used to fight alongside Shuri (Letitia Wright) and her Wakandan allies against Namor and the underwater kingdom of Talokan. The cast for Ironheart also includes Anthony Ramos, Alden Ehrenreich, Manny Montana, Cree Summer, Lyric Ross, Shea Couleé, Paul Calderón, and Sacha Baron Cohen.

The trailer [for Ironheart], we’re sorry to say, hasn’t been released online yet and didn’t show much, but it did display some brief footage of Riri Williams’ (Dominique Thorne) struggle to get her suit of armor built. And it does give us an idea of where the series might pick up in Riri’s story: as a young student at MIT, we see her stealing various parts from around campus, and then getting booted from the institute for doing so.

For those familiar with the comics, that shouldn’t be a huge surprise, as Riri’s origin story has her leaving school after being confronted by the thefts. The rest of the trailer is, well, a couple of badass Ironheart suit shots.

There were some assumptions made that Ironheart would be one of the MCU projects to be canceled by Bob Iger. But for now, it looks as if Marvel and Disney feel that one eagerly anticipated comic book adaptation about a young non-white woman suiting up to fight crime like her similarly named predecessor being completely shut down before it even sees the light of day is bad enough, let alone having that happen twice.

Source: IGN, IGN, and IGN (for all teaser descriptions)