The new release date for What little has been said about The Marvels doesn’t add anything new to that, but its new release date could at least shed some light on its importance to the timeline.
After several delays over the past few years, The Marvels has been given a new release date of July 28, 2023, swapping its original release date of February 17, 2023 with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Thanks to this, The Marvels is now the MCU Phase 4 project with the latest confirmed release date. Not only that, but since Phase 4 will have gone on for over two years at that point—almost two years exactly from the July 2021 release of Black Widow—The Marvels could be one of the last MCU projects to be a part of Phase 4, if not the last.
Because of The Marvels’ new release date, the film will likely be used to set up elements of the MCU Phase 5. If The Marvels late release means that it will be released near the end of Phase 4, then that means it could be used to introduce ideas that could be expanded on in later films. The specific ideas that could be introduced are unknown at the time, but one possibility is that with how heavily Captain Marvel is tied to the cosmic part of the Marvel Universe, 2023's The Marvels could expand on that by at least alluding to cosmic elements such as the Living Tribunal, who actually was supposed to be in Fantastic Four movie.
The way that Carol, herself, is connected to various projects also suggests that The Marvels will be important for Phase 5. For example, the post-credits scene to Disney+'s Secret Invasion will likely tie into The Marvels in some fashion, and considering the major changes to the status quo of the comics the original story made at the time, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to think that The Marvels would continue Secret Invasion’s aftermath to set up changes of a similar nature.
It’s still unknown how long the MCU Phase 4 will go on for, but The Marvels’ new release date of July 2023 means that it could be one of the last Phase 4 projects, and that, in turn, could mean that it will be used to set up Phase 5. Whether it’s through introducing new aspects into the MCU or continuing where previous entries left off, there are a lot of different things The Marvels could do to set up MCU Phase 5. Naturally, all of that is conjecture, but by the time The Marvels finally releases, it should be abundantly clear what the film will mean for Phase 5, if anything at all.
