Marvel is attempting to pull a Lord of the Rings trilogy with its two new Avengers movies, Doomsday and Secret Wars . The plan is to release them exactly a year apart, with Doomsday on December 18, 2026 and Secret Wars on December 17, 2027. Now, new reports from insiders say that may not happen.

This has not been confirmed by Disney, and almost certainly would not be until Doomsday itself is released. But even outside of these reports, the overall math of getting a second huge Avengers film out within a year has always seemed daunting, even if Marvel has done it before.

Insider DanielRPK first said that filming would be delayed until November, while shortly after, Apocalyptic Horseman , who has had several scoops pan out as of late, said that it may be January instead, leaving an incredibly tight timeline to both film and do post-production for a film this large with a months-long start delay. He says wrap would be in April or May, which would only leave 7-8 months for post-production. Later, DanielRPK said that Apoc was right, and that filming would, in fact, start in January 2027.

It has been tough to make this math work from the start. Avengers: Doomsday started filming in the spring of 2025 and wrapped in September 2025. Post-production then took over a year, and in total, it will be around a 20-month process in total when the December 2026 release date hits.

Doomsday and Secret Wars were not filmed back-to-back or anything like that, so there are obviously significant questions about how all this is supposed to work, especially as Marvel is trying to mirror Infinity War/Endgame , where the second film is certainly as large, if not larger than the first. A year gap seems implausible with these new reports.

Then, if one thing moves, other things usually have to move. Secret Wars will introduce more X-Men, and the actual X-Men movie from Jake Schreier is meant to release May 5, 2028. Now, it seems possible, if not likely Secret Wars could move closer to spring instead. Then there’s Ghost Rider in July and Black Panther 3 in December 2027. It’s pretty tight already.

It’s not impossible. Infinity War and Endgame came out a year apart in April 2018 and April 2019, and we know how huge those films were. But we are 7-8 years on from that, and things can change. I don’t think fans would especially care if Secret Wars was delayed 3-6 months, but Disney might. The MCU has zero films planned in 2027 except for Secret Wars , so if that doesn’t arrive, that will be more than an entire year without any, which certainly isn’t great on the accounting side. The priority, of course, should be to make the best film possible as the next era of the MCU is hugely important.

It seems exceedingly unlikely that if this is happening, Marvel would confirm it before Doomsday is out in 2.5 months, but we’ll see what happens from here. I’ve reached out to Disney for comment and will update if I hear back.

Follow me on Twitter , YouTube , and Instagram .

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy .