The world of Disney+’s Marvel TV output has been struck by a confluence of forces even more powerful than the roiling, plot-dictating whims of Chaos Magic itself: Marvel fatigue on the one hand, and the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes on the other. Hence news from Variety tonight that Disney+ has had to significantly shift its schedule for upcoming Marvel releases, kicking several that were previously scheduled for 2023 into somewhere in 2024, instead.
Let’s start with the ironic major exception to all this time-shifting: The second season of Loki, which is set for October 6, and which will be staying right there, thank you very much. But while that exploration of comic book counterfactuals is sticking firmly in place, its animated counterpart isn’t: The second season of What If…? has now been moved back to December, after originally being set to come out much earlier in 2023.
Over in live-action, Hawkeye spinoff Echo has gotten a similar delay, with the Alaqua Cox-starring show bounced from November 2023 to January 2024. Similary, Kathryn Hahn’s Agatha series—which has been billed under a number of alliterative subtitles, including House Of Harkness, Darkhold Diaries, and Coven Of Chaos—has been pushed all the way back to fall 2024. That one’s especially odd, since the show reportedly managed to finish all of its filming before the SAG-AFTRA strike set in. (Maybe Disney CEO Bob Iger is genuinely serious about all this “spacing our superhero stuff out” talk, although given Agatha’s potential to be extremely fun, we’d just as soon something else get such a distant punt.)
Finally—and for old nerds like ourselves, possibly most importantly—animated series X-Men ’97 has also been delayed, and won’t come out until early 2024. (That’s the animated series that will serve as a direct continuation of the Fox X-Men animated series from the ’90s, i.e., a homing missile of nostalgia aimed directly at our decrepit and shriveled hearts.)
