Marvel Announces Phase 3 Movie Slate and Avengers 2 Clip

In advance of the teaser scene from Avengers: Age of Ultron (clip below), Marvel announced their phase 3 slate of 9 movies. To no surprise it remains ambitious and tied together by Avengers 3 and 4 but includes a bunch of characters that the average non-comic book fan may not have heard of. The movies are:

2016
Captain America: Civil War (5/6)
Doctor Strange (11/4)

2017
Guardians of the Galaxy 2 (5/5)
Thor: Ragnorok (7/28)
Black Panther (11/3)

2018
Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (5/4)
Captain Marvel (7/5)
Inhumans (11/2)

2019
Avengers: Infinity War Part 2 (5/3)

Phase 3 ends with Infinity War Part 2 and is assumed that by the time its over the Avengers will be made up of an almost entirely different team (which is almost a tradition from the comics). It also marks Marvel going from a slate of two movies per year to three. As for some of the title references, Captain America: Civil War is a reference to a 2005-ish story line that pitted hero against hero (and Captain America vs Iron Man) when a tragedy resulted in the US government deciding that all superheroes must register with the government including revealing their identities to agencies that are not exactly leak free. The movie short description "global superhuman registration with a specific inciting incident" and "secret identities aren't as important in the [Marvel Cinematic Universe] version of the story" according to Marvel Studios head Chris Feige.

Thor: Ragnorok is described as "This is a very important movie for us in Phase 3. We plan on taking Thor to another level. It picks up where we leave Thor in 'Avengers: Age of Ultron' and impacts everything that comes after" said Feige. Ragnorok is the Norse version of the end of all life in all the nine realms. Feige describes Captain Marvel as "...Carol Danvers. This film has been in the works almost as long as Doctor Strange or Guardians of the Galaxy before it came out, and one of the key things was figuring out what we wanted to do with it. Her adventures are very earthbound, but her powers are based in the cosmic realm." A male Captain Marvel was the counter to the power of Thanos and critical to his defeat in the Infinity War comic series from the 80s.

Which brings us to Avengers: Infinity War which Feige says "We've always had a plan since Nick Fury broke into Tony Stark's house and told him he's part of a bigger universe. 'Avengers: Infinity War Part 1' is the beginning of the culmination of everything that has come before." In the comic series the short summary is the Marvel universe of heroes, lead by the Avengers, stop the mad tyrant Thanos from destroying all life in all of the universe using the power of the Infinity Gauntlet. The Gauntlet, compromised of the power gems (the various objects from the movies like the Tesseract, Loki's staff, and the gem from Guardians of the Galaxy and likely future movies, basically gives the wearer the power beyond a god.

The scope is enormous and will be the culmination of near two dozen movies. Something never attempted or achieved before in movies. Whether you like the movies or not, you have to give Marvel credit for their ambition. Even now the other studios are trying to "create" their own cinematic universes and compared to Marvel, they are still thinking way to small and safe.