Four missing Marvel movies on Disney Plus now have release dates

(Image credit: Marvel)

Disney Plus has launched with an impressive 16 Marvel movies, up from disappointingly thin eight pictures that were originally promised at release. That's a solid line-up to get started with, but if you want to marathon the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, some of the best films are missing, like Avengers: Infinity War and Thor: Ragnarok. Luckily, if you search the Disney Plus app for some of those films in the US, you'll see release dates on their respective pages.

On December 5 of this year, you can watch Thor: Ragnarok on Disney Plus. On March 4 2020, Black Panther joins the service, while Avengers: Infinity War, an essential pairing with Avengers: Endgame, arrives on June 25. Finally, one of the most forgettable Marvel movies, Ant-Man and the Wasp, arrives all the way on July 29, 2020 – but it's really not worth waiting for if you've never seen it. 

So what's still missing? 

The remaining omissions from the MCU are pretty obvious ones: Spider-Man: Homecoming and Far From Home, two films where the rights are controlled by Sony. The other holdout is 2008's The Incredible Hulk, which featured the first instance of one MCU character wandering into another's movie, as Robert Downey Jr made an appearance as Tony Stark. That one is explained by Universal owning the distribution rights to the film, which was still confirmed to be the case as recently as Disney's 2018 financial report

That doesn't mean those films will never come to Disney Plus. Like Netflix or Amazon, Disney could choose to negotiate the rights to show the films on the streaming service. It just means it's more complicated than releasing films it created and distributed. 

If you're hoping for a full MCU marathon, then, you might want to hold onto your DVDs and 4K Blu-rays for the foreseeable future. 

Samuel Roberts

Samuel is a PR Manager at game developer Frontier. Formerly TechRadar's Senior Entertainment Editor, he's an expert in Marvel, Star Wars, Netflix shows and general streaming stuff. Before his stint at TechRadar, he spent six years at PC Gamer. Samuel is also the co-host of the popular Back Page podcast, in which he details the trials and tribulations of being a games magazine editor – and attempts to justify his impulsive eBay games buying binges.