Since 2019 we’ve all wondered: How will Marvel ever possibly top Avengers: Endgame? The movie cost something like $300 to $400 million to make, featured half the actors in Hollywood, and brought an end to a story that had been going on for about 20 movies. If there was ever going to be another Avengers movie it would have to be as big — or bigger! — than that.
Well, we don’t know all the details, but we do know how they’re going to try: With not one but two more Avengers movies in a single year. (These will be the fifth and sixth in the franchise.) At Comic-Con 2022, Marvel announced the movies, and their titles: Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Avengers: Secret Wars. Both movies will open in theaters in 2025.
What will they entail? Well, if they’re anything like the comics, that definitely offers some clues.
Secret Wars are the names of multiple Marvel comic series through the years. In the first, a group of Marvel’s biggest heroes and their biggest villains were transported to a mysterious planet called Battleworld, where a being known as the Beyonder forced them to fight for survival. In a more recent updated Secret Wars “incursions” between different dimensions of the multiverse resulted in the entire Marvel Universe being destroyed — except for one patchwork planet called Battleworld that was controlled by a godlike version of Doctor Doom. The lead-up to that Secret Wars storyline looked a lot like some of the material in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
“The Kang Dynasty” was the name of an epic storyline in the late ’90s Avengers comic book written by Kurt Busiek. In it, Kang arrives from the future and conquers Earth in the present day, although he is eventually defeated by the Avengers. The series was notable for running for over a year in the main Avengers series, from the summer of 2001 to the summer of 2002.
Again, those are the comics, not the movies; some of Marvel’s movies have borrowed titles from the comics while changing their stories drastically. (The Infinity War comic book was almost nothing like the Infinity War movie, for example.) But we know this much: Marvel will have to pull off something truly massive and thrilling with these movies to top Avengers: Endgame.
Avengers: The Kang Dynasty will open in theaters on May 2, 2025. Avengers: Secret Wars will open in theaters on November 7, 2025. Again, there will be two gigantic Avengers movies in the span of a single calendar year. That is wild.
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