Disney has confirmed The Falcon and the Winter Soldier will premiere on Disney+ this summer. As part of Phase 4, Marvel Studios will be releasing several MCU series as exclusives on Disney’s newly-launched streaming service. This year alone, Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan will reprise their roles as Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, paying off the final moments of Avengers: Endgame (in which Steve Rogers passed the Captain America mantle over to Sam). In addition, the Marvel series known as WandaVision - featuring Elisabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany back as Wanda Maximoff and Vision - was moved up from 2021 to 2020 earlier this year, to help fill out Disney+’s original programming slate for the next twelve months.
Both of those shows unveiled their first-look footage during a Disney+ Super Bowl 2020 trailer that further highlighted Loki, a 2021 release that (naturally) sees Tom Hiddleston back in the role of Thor’s trickester sibling following the events of Endgame. Disney also released brand-new synopses for all three shows shortly after, but refrained from confirming their premiere dates. As of today, that’s no longer the case.
Speaking on the company’s first quarter earnings call of 2020, Disney CEO Bob Iger confirmed The Falcon and the Winter Soldier will begin streaming in August (presumably, on a yet to be specified Friday, as has been the case with all Disney+ exclusives up to this point). He also revealed WandaVision will launch a few months after that in December.
While this news is obviously welcome, it comes as no surprise. People have been predicting The Falcon and the Winter Soldier would premiere this summer ever since WandaVision changed dates to late 2020, as a way of giving the two MCU series some needed room to breathe and potentially grow their audiences. Confusingly, the show’s post-Super Bowl synopsis listed it for a fall release after an August date was reported in January, so it’s possible that spurred Iger to clarify things during today’s earnings call. Whatever the case may be, Disney+ now have a promising docket for the latter half of the year, starting with The Falcon and the Winter Soldier in August, The Mandalorian season 2 in October, and WandaVision to round out the frame.
Directed by Kari Skogland (The Handmaid’s Tale) with Malcolm Spellman (Empire) seriving as head writer, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier will follow Sam and Bucky on a new adventure that brings them into conflict with the U.S. government, which has its own pick in mind - John Walker aka. U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell) - to become the new Captain America. So far, the show sounds like an intriguing continuation of the Captain America films and the way they explored what happened when Steve Rogers realized his personal values and ideals were different from those of the government. Sam and Bucky didn’t get a whole lot of interactions in those movies, but the humor in the scenes they did share (most notably, their car ride with Steve in Civil War) bode well for the series. So, with a little luck, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier will kick-off Marvel’s run of Disney+ titles on a strong note.
Source: Bob Iger
