Marvel Studios came back to Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con with a Doomsday footage reel, two new movies and a number that got less attention than it deserved: four films across three years. That is the slate now, and the gaps in it say more than the announcements.

What is actually confirmed

Per Marvel's own Hall H recap, the dated slate runs: Avengers: Endgame Encore, a re-release on 25 September 2026 carrying new footage that sets up Doomsday. Then Avengers: Doomsday on 18 December 2026, which the Russo brothers have finished shooting. Then Avengers: Secret Wars on 17 December 2027. Then two 2028 films: Ghost Rider, with Ryan Gosling starring and Shawn Levy directing, and Black Panther III on 15 December 2028, with Ryan Coogler returning, David Jonsson cast as a grown T'Challa II, and Letitia Wright and Winston Duke back. Coogler is shooting it on 70mm, a first for the MCU.

That is the whole list. Two Avengers films, Ghost Rider and Black Panther III, spread over 2026, 2027 and 2028. Kevin Feige framed the reduction as deliberate, saying the studio is focusing on quality and that when quantity is high, teams get spread thin. It is a reasonable thing to say after a run of films that underperformed, and it is also the kind of thing studios say once the decision has already been made for them.

The Avengers: Doomsday cast and Kevin Feige posing on stage in front of the Hall H crowd at San Diego Comic-Con 2026. Photo via Marvel.
The Doomsday cast closing out Marvel Studios’ Hall H panel at San Diego Comic-Con 2026. Photo via Marvel.

The empty dates

Disney is still holding untitled Marvel slots on 5 May and 28 July 2028, plus 4 May and 13 July 2029, with the 2029 pair added recently. So the calendar is fuller than the announcements, which is the studio's long-standing habit of booking cinema real estate before anything is greenlit. Read the release schedule as intent, not as a slate. Dates like these have moved or evaporated plenty of times.

The X-Men question

Here is where to be careful, because a lot of coverage is not being. Marvel Studios has not announced an X-Men film. It has not dated one, cast one, or named a director. What exists is consistent reporting from multiple trade outlets that one of those unfilled late-2028 slots is being held for the team's live-action MCU debut. That is a rumour with weight behind it, and it is still a rumour.

Cyclops on his knees firing a huge optic blast upward, screaming, surrounded by fire and wreckage. Still from the Avengers: Doomsday X-Men teaser via Marvel Studios.
James Marsden’s Cyclops in the Doomsday X-Men teaser. The mutants are in the footage; the film is not on the schedule. Still via Marvel Studios.

What is real is that mutants keep arriving through side doors. The Doomsday footage shown in Hall H ends with Doctor Doom commanding Sentinels lifted straight out of X-Men: Days of Future Past, against Avengers, Fantastic Four and X-Men together. Ryan Reynolds turned up at the panel in a new grey-and-black Deadpool suit that Marvel pointedly declined to explain, per ScreenRant's panel rundown. And over at Sony, Spider-Man: Brand New Day appears to be introducing a live-action Jean Grey this week. The mutants are already in the building. Nobody has signed the lease.

Then Deadpool grabbed a microphone

The oddest thing at the panel was not announced, it wandered in. Ryan Reynolds spent the convention in a grey-and-black Deadpool suit, walking the floor and posing for photos as an unusually convincing cosplayer. He told Variety he managed it with no handlers, no security and no ropes. Then he queued at the Hall H audience microphone.

Still in character, he introduced himself as Ricky, said he was cosplaying hard, and asked Paul Rudd where Thor was and why he had been crying, a callback to Deadpool & Wolverine. He then asked the assembled Doomsday cast when filming started and whether there was room for any last-minute additions. Told there were no more photo opportunities, per The Hollywood Reporter, he dropped the mic and left.

Ryan Reynolds in a grey-and-black Deadpool suit holding a microphone in the Hall H crowd, phones raised around him, at San Diego Comic-Con 2026.
Reynolds at the Hall H audience mic in the grey X-Force suit, asking the Doomsday cast for a job. Photo via Getty Images.

The bit is funny. The suit is the part worth noting. Grey and black is X-Force, the covert Wolverine-led team that swapped the bright reds for stealth colours, which is a very deliberate costume to wear to a panel where nobody will confirm you are in the film. Marvel let the whole thing happen and then said nothing about it, which is either excellent restraint or the least subtle casting hint of the weekend.

What Marvel did not say

Two silences stand out. Avengers: Secret Wars, the film that is supposed to close the Multiverse Saga, got nothing at all: no footage, no cast, no director talk, at the panel where Marvel showed off everything else. Feige is holding it for D23 in August. And not a single Disney+ series was announced, which for a studio that spent five years building television into the connective tissue of the whole project is the loudest thing that happened in Hall H.

Our take

Doomsday's trailer did 503 million views in a day and still came second to a Spider-Man film Marvel Studios does not make. That is the shape of things right now. The appetite is enormous, the output is shrinking, and the studio's answer is to promise fewer, better films while quietly holding four undated slots in case it changes its mind. Discipline and retreat look identical from the outside; the difference only shows up on screen. December 2027 is the real test, and Marvel just spent its biggest stage of the year saying nothing about it.

Watch the Doomsday trailer