#203 – The Road to Doomsday: Marvel’s 2026 Runway

Welcome back to Marvel Maniac and MCU After Show. I'm your host, Eric Cicada, aka Mr. Honest. Back with you for another short episode, yet powerful in the way that we're going to look at everything coming up in the year 2026. MCU related or adjacent. That means a couple of the animated series that aren't technically a part of the sacred timeline you might call it, but they do exist in the multiverse. And this is the Multiverse saga. Some we will cover, some we'll discuss covering, and most of all, we'll hype over all of it. This is going to be one of my shorter episodes of the year. And as you can see, we've been posting some short ones. I've been a little bit busy. Long story short tooth pain issues. I wish my, my, I had super. Just a superhero mouth where all my teeth issues were heroically turned. My Vibranium teeth, anyone? What if I accidentally like bit my tongue and my tongue will come straight off? Okay, well we won't get too far into that. That would be terrifying. What would they call me? The Vibranium chomper v. Chomp. Mr. Honest Teeth. Okay, that's it. That's my, that's my speculation for what that show would look like. Let's get into the real lineup. We have Wonder man coming out on 1-27-26. Daredevil, born again season two around March 4, 2026. The Punisher, his special movie slash minisode. I have the title War Journal, which came up online somewhere. Spring 2026. We're slated right now. X Men 97, season two. We haven't covered even season one. We'll talk about that when we get come back to it in summer. Spider man, brand new day. Probably the most anticipated before December's Doomsday, which will be out or on or around July 31st. Your friendly neighborhood Spider man season two, if you remember. I loved this show. I thought it was a lot of fun. It does take place in a very MCU adjacent world. Except instead of befriending Peter, it's Norman Osborne instead of Tony Stark. So interesting. Fall 2026. We're looking at that Vision Quest. This is a big one. This is the one they're saying the main story on the Disney plus shows is going to end with Vision Quest. So we're not going to get too many more big like iconic Loki level you have to watch just to watch the MCU show. This is the last one that will tie into movies, apparently. And then finally the one we're all waiting for is Avengers Doomsday December 18, 2026 let's go into these a little bit, talk about them, what I'm expecting and just a little bit of a, you know, a cool episode. Getting a little hyped on what we got coming up this year. Even though it's only two movies, these shows do fill out the slate and I'd say it's a pretty great slate. Let's start with wonder man. January 27, 2026 we got wild card energy on this one. Hollywood actor for in the mcu, Simon Williams is thrust into the world of superheroes as he gets powers of his own and becomes the new superhero Wonder Man. This is kind of like a meta show where Hollywood meets Marvel meets Hollywood meets Marvel. It's a little bit of a paradox and it's about a TV show called Wonder man and then an actor who's going to try and play that that character will actually become that character in real life. I think it's a fun concept. This is the most wild card of the the bunch. Just because it's something brand new. We don't know much about any of the characters except for one definitive char that I'm sure everyone who's going to watch this all eight episodes of this show I believe week to week Trevor Slattery's returning by played by Ben Kingsley. If you don't remember Trevor, he was the original Mandarin. Well, we find out he's just an actor called Trevor, but he was pretty dang intimidating as the Mandarin in Iron Man 3. That's where he was introduced. He also returns in Shang Chi, the real Mandarin. Shangchi's dad keeps Trevor Slattery as a jester type and he has his little pet called Morris and it's cute. He's from the dimension that Shangchi is kind of born out of. I have to refresh my Shangchi. See they need to make a sequel by now considering it's the last new show. I think it's going to be a lot of fun. The if you haven't seen the trailer for it, I'd look it up. Just wonder man 2026 first thing we're getting in January and I hope it's week to week because if it's not, I don't like covering shows that drop all their episodes at once. It's nice to like watch one week and then the story sinks in a little bit better. We'll see where that goes. I think from the trailer this looks promising, light hearted and fun and I will be covering it week to week. So be ready for that on our next big coverage of what's coming out in the mcu. So after Wonder man, we have to look forward to not long after Daredevil born again season two on March 4, 2026. This is a real return. It's a tone stabilizer for the street level mcu. It could quietly be one of Marvel's biggest hits of the year. To be honest, the first season went over really well. There were some critiques on it. That's why. Why? Because they had different writers for certain episodes and they had a whole different team coming kind of overhaul the first season and it seems that the overhauled stuff was typically loved by the fans. I like the whole series SL show and I was going to try and you know, if you're a long term listener, even a recent listener, I've been trying to figure out how to cover all the Netflix shows because I keep falling into a rabbit hole of this is too long, this is not enough. And I'm still trying to figure out how to get you guys a definitive breakdown on a lot of the Netflix lore and heroes. So you're ready for this Daredevil Born Again Season two. You have a refresher, you get to know the characters a little bit. I'm not promising anything, but an idea I have is a big kind of New Year's coverage of all of the Netflix cu, but it's now part of the MCU and I'm really excited for what Daredevil Born Again Season two comes if we we've have covered season one of this show. It is back in the catalog a bit, but go check it out. I had a lot of fun covering it and it was a great time to watch. Daredevil is one of the best, if not the best MCU TV shows, period. So I'm sure plenty of you are looking forward to that as well. And we can expect Defenders references from the Netflix. We can expect an actual setup to Spider Man Brand New Day coming out in July. And I don't know if we're going to get some setup for the Punisher Working title War journal in spring 2026 because that's what we have next in that slate. I I believe this one is just estimation estimated time of when this is going to come out. A dark kind of mini movie about Frank Castle showing up and doing his own thing in the mcu. It's very gory, very interesting and very fun. I've only seen season one of the Punisher from Netflix, so I'm gonna try and watch season two before we get to this mini movie. However, I'm not sure if he'll be involved in Born Again. Going into this special. Setting his story up a little bit more. He. He seems to escape from. From where we left him. Escape. King Kingpin's like dungeon of people. I'm gonna. I'm gonna guess and he's just take a guess that he's not really gonna have a big part to play in born again season two. But maybe it will set up this spring 2026 ideally. Punisher War Journal Working title again Working title. I think it's gonna be fun. I like the Punisher. I'm very curious how he'll do in Spider Man. And yeah, we'll see what Frank Castle has. Jonathan Baron, John Barenthal his name. I always knew him from the Walking Dead. And the Punisher is like the greatest role for him. He plays. He plays him so well. And that's really my favorite Punisher. I know there's a movie, I didn't really watch it since I was a kid, so I can't say this one's better. But I can say people like this one more than that. It's just a little more in tune with the comics is what I've heard. Next up, we have X Men 97 Season 2. Estimated to be around somewhere around summer and 26. This is a hype machine, this, this series. And I will say I watched the first season and I did watch the entire series leading up to the season. This was about a year ago though. So I am a little bit personally confused on how to cover this. If I cover it without going over season one, I guess the people who already watch season one could chime in and you know, kind of fill in the slates themselves. But if there's some people coming in just watching season two, I'd be curious if I need to come up with a big recap episode for all of it. I would like to do that. There's a chance I will. There's a chance I might just cover season two and reference the old show while I am cover the old show and season one. While I'm talking about X Men 97 season two references and whatnot. This show is probably the furthest stretched out of the current MCU multiverse timeline. But that being said, it's one of the fans most favorite shows to come out of Disney. I think Disney's got something special with their animated department and I think they should keep going and making different multiversal hero shows just to get more out of the heroes or like, like what they did with 97. They picked up the old show that was in the 90s and they continued the story, which is very intriguing. And they, they made a killer season one. If you have not seen it, let me just recommend just go watch that if you haven't seen it yet. You'll thank me later for that and we'll see. We'll see how we end up covering this show after that. We have the big one, Spider Man, Brand New Day, July 31, 2026. My dates are all sourced from this, like jpeg of all the things coming out. So forgive me for not finding the name of that source. I might be wrong on the dates, but it's somewhere around this point. If anything, definitely July. Brand New day is going to be huge. It's going to bring all together the Daredevil story, in my opinion. They say the Punisher and Hulk are going to be in it. I don't know if that's true about the Hulk. I do know the Punisher for sure has been in talks for a long time. So it's interesting to see what kind of arc we'll see the Punisher take from Daredevil's Born Again Season two to his War Journal again working title in spring and then him coming in to help Spidey somewhere in summer 2026 and or, you know, it's just going to be very interesting to see how the Punisher can interact with Spider Man. I think it's going to be really fun. It's one of those wow, I really can't imagine that type scenarios to where I'm like, I really want to see that. I hope that that's the only person they're revealing is Punisher. But in reality, I would love I would just love if they were fighting Kingpin is one of them, one of if not the main bad. And that Daredevil and the Defenders get involved with Spider man as Spider man forms his own little street Avengers. I almost said Revengers and that would be really awesome. Honestly, if they even brought just Daredevil, I'd be happy. But I think it'd be very cool if he did a little Defenders. Like the Defenders is maybe what he'll form in that movie again because they came together in their own Netflix show again. We'll cover that if and when we can. I I There's also so many other stories and series I want to cover, like including the original Spider man and Amazing Spider man. Those movies I wanted to cover So I do think we will be seeing those guys again. However, we got to talk about what's on the actual slate and how to get ready for that brand new day. Is is a. In my opinion, it's going to be the brand new trilogy of Spider man movies. I think we're going to see at least three more Spider Men. I think that's not counting the Avengers and I. And I honestly think that this is going to be a new Peter Parker. Same same character, matured, battle battle worn, mentally tarnished a bit because of all he. He's lost and been through. It's a lot. So that goes right into your friendly neighborhood. Spider Man Season 2 coming in Fall 2026. If you remembered, I loved the first season of this show. Norman Osborne is, is Peter's mentor off the bat. Tony Stark and Captain America, they're having like a civil war in the background of this show and it's following a little bit of the background of what could could have been happening during all that. If Spider man wasn't a part of the Avengers. He really wasn't, but he was. That was his entrance into the movies. Little, a little tiny bit of a shift in the timeline. And you get this show and I found it a lot of fun. We covered it week to week. I think they released a few episodes at a time from what I remember of last year or earlier this year when we covered it. But we did cover the whole season one. So if you're watching that, you could listen to the podcast as a companion piece or just go listen to an episode or two whenever you're done watching that one. So I got a high hopes for both Spider man projects. I don't know when the spider verse is coming back, but we'll, we'll talk about that whenever that is decided. This is all about 2026. We don't have much love. We got Vision quest later in 2026. Very, very secretive. It seems to be what the story is going to be. I think a lot of people have theorized that Vision Quest is going to contain a lot of that WandaVision slash Agatha all along story with Billy and Tommy and the family of Wanda. They say she can't come back. Personally, I'm gonna be honest, I don't think Wanda will return in this show. But I do think the fallout of everything that's happened with Wanda and Agatha will culminate in Vision Quest. And like I said earlier when introducing it, this will be one of the few shows that is relevant to the movies which does go back and make Wonder man and Daredevil pretty much relevant to the movies that. That's a big statement for them to have made. So I love Vision. It's been too long. White Vision started off at the very beginning of Phase 4 in W Division. And we're gonna finally maybe get caught up on what he's been doing, where he's been. Was it outer space? Has he been sitting in a bunker thinking over his life choices? What in the world is going on with Vision? Is he going to get his family back together? If so, how? Lots of questions, lots of curiosity. I'm excited for the trailer to drop on that one. And finally the one, the big hitter, the. The one everyone's been waiting for. The one we don't want to move too fast towards because it's silly year away. But in all reality, it is coming like a freight train at the same time. Avengers Doomsday December 18, 2026. This is the event, the movie of the year. There's not been an avengers movie since 2019. So, yeah, we got a little bit of time in between the Avengers. This is Robert Johnny Jr. Coming back as Dr. Doom. I think there's a lot of secrets and a lot of things we can theorize about this. We probably will make many more episodes about this movie going forward. So I won't get too into theories right now. All I'll say is it's the big one and it's going to be epic no matter what way you look at it. Some people will love it. Some people will hate it. Some people will say this is the end of the mcu. Some people say will say this is the brand new birth of the mcu. Some people will dis on Doom. Some people will love Dr. Doom. I mean, we got all sorts of fans and it's not going to be pretty, I don't think. I think it's going to be a war, a secret war. That's the following year. Anyway, I just wanted to run through the list. That's all we got for today. And I think it's a pretty fun slate. I think we're. I think they're pretty well timed out to where we've got a kind of constant flow given a week or two of Marvel events. And it's not crowded. This road is not crowded. It's curated. Every project is a stepping stone, each each one tightening the spring for Doomsday. The closer we get, the louder the quiet feels. And that's where the hype really lives. If you're as excited about me as these projects. I want to know your thoughts. Marvel Maniac Pod gmail.com We need your help. We need you to subscribe. But not only subscribe, rate and give us a comment on the itunes section of our show. We need more ratings. We want to get into the algorithm and that's the way to do it. So if you can just do me a favor, give us a rating. Leave us a nice little review. It goes the longest way. Even on other platforms, it goes the longest way. We have a patreon. Patreon.com marvelmaniac we post minisodes every Saturday at 4am and or 5am if that matters to Central Time. And yeah, I love the Patreon. I think it's a place you should come. Even if you are not subscribed or want to pay. Pay money. You can be a free user and listen to older, unvaulted episodes weekly of our minisodes. We got a lot of minisodes and we do one once a week. I said that. But this is my most riffy episode in a while. Older listeners might notice I'm a little more ranty today. And all of a sudden 18 minutes went by. I thought this was going to take me seven minutes. But that just means I'm excited for what's to come. We'll see. For coming up with Wonder Man. I love a new hero. I don't think we're gonna get many more. At least, I think this is the last new hero in a while. I read a rumored article that she Hulk is just completely gone. They're gonna cut her from the slate. No TV show, no movie over. Geez. I mean, I like she Hulk. If you go back and listen to my crappy coverage of it, it's just crappy because my mic was bad. That was a weird time. But I like the show. When it was coming out, I had fun with it. I looked past the CGI laziness. Sorry I call it laziness. But it is. Because that's a big way. That's a big thing for people. They got to be drawn in. They can't be thinking, I'll CGI all the time. So that's my one critique of that show. I hope she actually does make a comeback. And that's all I got until next week. Avengers disassemble.