It seems like every few weeks we hear an announcement about yet another superhero movie getting added to the release calendar, but today’s news is about taking one off of it. Marvel has pulled Inhumans off its 2019 slate, confirming Kevin Feige‘s recent admission that the picture would probably get delayed.



Marvel broke the news very late Friday afternoon, as PR professionals usually do when they’re hoping no one makes too big a deal out of their bad news. Inhumans was originally set for release on November 2, 2018 and then pushed back to July 12, 2019 when Marvel added Spider-Man and Ant-Man and the Wasp to its Phase Three plans. Feige acknowledged earlier this month that the film was likely to get pushed back again, but said he wasn’t sure to what date, and it seems Marvel still hasn’t decided.

At the time Feige insisted that Inhumans wasn’t dead, and that it was just “a question of when” it’d finally get going. The superhero movie has not yet announced a director or a screenwriter or any stars (although Vin Diesel has certainly tried his best to get the rumor mill churning). Joe Robert Cole (Black Panther) wrote an early draft of the script but as of last year he was no longer involved with the project.

Inhumans was officially announced as part of Marvel’s Phase Three lineup back in 2014, but it’s been dogged by cancellation rumors since last year. A lot of that speculation stemmed from the growing distance between Marvel’s TV and movie divisions — the Inhumans, a race of superpowered people, play a major role in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. but it’s been unclear how or if that plotline might intersect with the films.

Marvel already has three 2020 dates (May 1, July 10, and November 6) set aside for as-yet-unnamed projects. It seems telling that the studio opted to yank Inhumans altogether, rather than shuffle it to one of those dates — it suggests Inhumans probably isn’t coming until 2021 or even later.