Shang-Chi 2 is still happening. Again.
Director Destin Daniel Cretton is out doing press for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which is now out in theaters, and the question about his long-delayed Marvel sequel came up one more time, this round from Brandon Davis.
Davis points out the sequel is taking a long time to happen and asks Cretton straight out if it’s still happening.
“Yeah, it’s still happening,” Cretton confirms.
Davis: “Aww come on, hurry up, let’s go.”
Cretton, laughing: “You gotta tell that to the industry!”
The real quote is the second one
Everybody is going to run the “still happening” line.
The line that actually matters is the one right after it.
Cretton didn’t say the script is locked. He didn’t say a date is coming. He didn’t say the movie is being scheduled. Asked to hurry up, he pointed at everybody else in the building.
When the director of a sequel deflects a “hurry up” to “the industry,” he’s telling you the holdup isn’t sitting on his desk. It’s sitting at Marvel.
That’s a director publicly declining to take the blame for a movie that was announced years ago and has gone nowhere since, and he’s right not to take it.
The same answer, six weeks apart
In June, Cretton gave essentially this exact answer on Deadline’s Crew Call podcast, saying the team was working on it and wanted to honor the reception of the first film.
We broke down why that update sounded better than it was at the time.
Simu Liu has been running the same play, telling People that Marvel hasn’t scrapped the sequel while lining up his appearances in the two Avengers movies instead.
Six weeks later, here’s the same confirmation with zero new information attached to it. No title. No date. No production start. Nothing that would separate this from the last four times somebody said it.
Marvel’s calendar hasn’t moved either
Nearly five years after Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings opened in September 2021, the sequel remains untitled, undated, and not shooting.
Avengers: Secret Wars on December 17, 2027 is still the last dated Marvel movie on the schedule.
Following Secret Wars will be the X-Men relaunch and Black Panther 3, which now has an official release date thanks to Comic-Con.
Shang-Chi 2 is still nowhere to be seen, which is why we laid out ten reasons the sequel may never get made.
The math behind the stall isn’t complicated.
The first film did $432.2 million worldwide against a production budget reported north of $150 million, which is not the profile of a movie a studio rushes to follow up.
Marvel fast-tracked Black Panther, Doctor Strange, and Guardians sequels because those films worked. This one got an announcement and then silence.
Cretton keeps working, just not on this
Look at what he has actually done since. American Born Chinese came and went at Disney+. He was attached to Avengers 5 back when it was The Kang Dynasty and departed. He was on Wonder Man, also canceled. And now he has a Sony tentpole opening this week.
If Brand New Day lands the way the early numbers suggest, and our full coverage hub on the film tracks where that goes, Sony is going to want him back before Marvel gets around to calling.
So yes, Shang-Chi 2 is “still happening.” It is happening in interviews and nowhere else, and the director just told you exactly who to ask about that. Believe it when there’s a release date attached to it.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day hits theaters July 31, 2026.
