Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts and Daredevil lead Marvel’s crowded 2025 plans

With the finale of witchy streaming show Agatha All Along on Halloween night, Marvel Studios has mostly wrapped its releases for the year.

There’s still the third season of animated series What If…? to come in December but its main titles are out of the way.

After years of saturation, Marvel smartly dialled back its breakneck release pace and in 2024 offered up only one movie, Deadpool & Wolverine, which grossed $US1.3 billion, and two live-action series, Echo and Agatha All Along, the latter of which was warmly received by fans.

It was a deliberate strategy for a soft reset after box office and critical disappointments including streaming series Secret Invasion and films Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels, and a loud discourse that insisted so-called superhero fatigue had set in.

Building back up some of the goodwill the brand enjoyed at the height of its popular pre-COVID, Marvel now seems ready to ramp back up.

Over the weekend, Disney held its fan event D23 in Sao Paulo, Brazil where it rolled out celebrities from the Marvel Cinematic Universe such as Anthony Mackie and David Harbour plus boss Kevin Feige, a superstar among devotees.

Top of the agenda were two new trailers for its upcoming film slate including videos for Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts* (the “*” in Thunderbolts* is a mystery which Marvel folks have promised will become clear upon release).

The fourth Captain America movie will be the first since Chris Evans stepped out of the franchise and retired his Steve Rogers character in 2019, and it will be a test for Marvel to see if they can extend the mantle with Mackie’s Sam Wilson picking up the shield.

The film had already been billed as a political thriller but the latest trailer cements just how much it appears to be drawing from the paranoid dramas of the 1960s and 1970s including Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View.

If it weren’t for the red, white and blue shield, Wilson’s aerobatics and Harrison Ford turning into a big hulking red thing, you might not even have cottoned on that Brave New World was an MCU project.

The story involves Sam uncovering a conspiracy that either involves or threatens the newly elected president of the US, Thunderbolt Ross (Ford, replacing the late William Hurt who previously played the character).

There are scenes of Sam interrogating Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly) who appears to have been brainwashed into criminal acts. It’s giving real Manchurian Candidate vibes.

There was also new footage from Thunderbolts*, centred on a group of anti-heroes from the MCU that is sent on a mission for the American government. The video included a one-minute action sequence scene followed by a two-and-a-half-minute trailer that (re)introduces the main characters.

They include Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes, David Harbour’s Red Guardian, Wyatt Russell’s John Walker, Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost, Olga Kurylenko’s Taskmaster and Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Valentina Allegra de Fontaine.

The film is directed by Jake Schreier, who helmed six episodes of the Emmy-winning series Beef and was co-written by Lee Sung Jin (Beef) and Joanna Calo (Beef, The Bear) along with veteran Marvel scribe Eric Pearson. With the contributions of the Beef team, there is an expectation that Thunderbolts* will have added moxie and humour.

The trailer revealed the studio obviously felt audiences either needed a reminder of the roles the characters had previously played in the MCU, or wanted to give them a cheat sheet so they didn’t have to go back and watch the five or more movies and TV shows they debuted in.

One of the key criticisms of the MCU in the past few years has been its complex narrative connections between its 34 films and 13 episodes of TV, and that the barrier to entry on a single project was too high if viewers felt as if they needed to do a mountain of homework to make sense of something.

That will be a continuing challenge for Marvel which had previously exploited the interconnectedness of its stories but has seen that advantage turned on its head after audiences sat out on a raft of post-COVID releases.

It will need to rebuild that enthusiasm — and the relative scarcity of 2024 was a necessary play — because there is a lot coming in 2025.

In addition to Captain America: Brave New World in February and Thunderbolts* in May, there will also be The Fantastic Four: First Steps in July. Considered Marvel Comics’ first family, The Fantastic Four rights returned to the fold after Disney’s acquisition of Fox in 2019.

The film is filming in the UK and stars Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn with WandaVision director Matt Shakman as director.

But it’s on the streaming side where Marvel will need to be cognisant of audience appetite and exhaustion, because along with three animated series, Your Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man, Eyes of Wakanda and Marvel Zombies, there are just as many live-action shows slated for next year.

There is Ironheart, featuring genius inventor Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) who is supposed to fill the hole created by the death of Tony Stark/Iron Man, who was introduced in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

Plus, there’s the miniseries Wonder Man, about a powered stuntperson (Yayha Abdul-Mateen II) who auditions for a role in a superhero TV show. The character will make his debut in the MCU here alone but there will be a familiar face with Ben Kingsley reprising his role as Trevor Slattery from Iron Man 3 and Shang-Chi.

The one everyone is hanging out for is Daredevil: Born Again, which brings back Charlie Cox, Vincent D’Onofrio and the cast from the 2015 series as part of a collaboration between Marvel and Netflix that focused on New York-based “street level” superheroes.

That iteration of Daredevil, a story about a blind lawyer and his formidable crime boss foe, ran for three seasons and was a favourite among fans who have been clamouring for its revival since the Netflix deal ended in 2019.

Cox and D’Onofrio were on hand in Sao Paulo to drum up excitement and, of course, the audience at D23 obliged.

So, even if Marvel’s nine releases next year may (or may not) prove to be too much after a year in which it premiered only four projects, at the very least, there’s one sure-fire hit with Daredevil: Born Again.