Marvel Studios now knows what it wants to be doing sixteen years from now.
Kevin Feige sat down with Chinese media in Shanghai this week, and in a roundtable circulating via Weibo (translated from Chinese), he offered up what he framed as a first-time reveal: Marvel has just mapped its film slate all the way to 2042.
Sixteen Years On The Whiteboard
Per Feige, the planning session just happened in the Marvel Studios conference room, and he said he hadn’t told anyone before the Shanghai sit-down.
The plan runs through 2042, sixteen years out.
He hedged it himself: will Marvel still be standing in 2042, and will the movies that get made be those movies?
His answer was that nobody knows, and that the point of the map is to process the enormous backlog of potential stories in the comics with some direction.
“Whether we can make it to 2042? Who knows? Will it be those movies? Who knows? But this is how we approach and plan the vast amount of potential stories in the comics,” he said,
For scale: Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars are films 39 and 40 of the MCU. A 2042 horizon means Marvel is sketching roughly its next fifty.
The Map Runs Through The X-Men
The reveal came attached to a bigger theme of the interview: Feige says the X-Men are the core of the next Marvel universe, describing the mutants as a saga with multiple phases of its own. Sixteen years of runway is what you clear when you’re planning a Mutant Saga, not a movie.
Feige also said the X-Men bench includes plenty of untapped Asia-Pacific characters, especially Chinese ones, that Marvel wants to explore, and teased that this won’t be his last Shanghai trip of the year, a strong signal the Doomsday cast assembles in China for the December rollout.
He closed the session by telling the room to meet him back there in 2042. Follow every step of the sixteen-year map at our Avengers: Doomsday hub.
Avengers: Doomsday opens December 18, 2026.
