Extra, Extra!: Marvel's New Phase 3 Lineup

In which I report on the latest in entertainment news.

I suppose that it was inevitable that Marvel would have to reconfigure their Phase 3 lineup if they planned on incorporating Spider-Man into it somewhere.  And really, on the grand scale of all things Marvel, these are some pretty minor changes, even if some of them are a bit more puzzling than others.  So behold, at last, Marvel's newly updated Phase 3:

Like I said, pretty minor adjustments on the whole, allowing for the new Spider-Man solo movie to slide in between Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and Thor: Ragnarok.  Spider-Man takes Thor 3's July 28 slot, Thor 3 takes Black Panther's November 3 slot, Black Panther takes Captain Marvel's November 2 slot and Inhumans gets pushed back to July 12, 2019.

Inhumans, however, is the somewhat more puzzling release date that I mentioned earlier.  Marvel seems pretty committed to releasing only three movies a year, specifically in May, July and November.  Not wanting to simply shoehorn in one in April (like Captain America: The Winter Soldier) or August (like Guardians of the Galaxy), they settled on their last non-Avengers film to be pushed to the end of Phase 3: meaning that Inhumans will anti-climactically cap off Phase 3 in the exact same way that Ant-Man will finish off Phase 2.

I get the reasoning behind it.  Marvel doesn't want to singlehandedly oversaturate the market.  Three movies every year will guarantee that they'll not stretch budgets, actors or behind-the-scenes talents too thinly.  After all, people will only continue to shell out money for these kinds of movies for as long as they're good (let's not forget how Batman and Robin was singlehandedly enough to kill the sub-genre).  That's intelligent, responsible, forward-thinking buisiness.

The results just look weird on paper.  It additionally just short of guarantees that the Inhumans themselves won't factor into either Infinity War film (which pretty much kills a lot of my hopes for a more direct Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. crossover on the big screen).  Regardless, I am more excited about Phase 3 than before, which is not something that I would have thought possible last week.

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