We aren’t going to have to wait long to find out what the Marvel Cinematic Universe looks like in a post-Thanos world; Sony announced today that it’s setting a July 2019 release date for the upcoming Spider-Man sequel, Far From Home, the first MCU movie to take place in a post-Avengers 4, post-“Phase 3" world.
As it happens, Sony has actually had a July 5, 2019 date webbed down for the proposed sequel for a while now, since before the first Tom Holland Spidey film, Homecoming, premiered. The most notable thing about the company apparently sticking to that date, though, is how close it falls to the upcoming (and still untitled) Avengers 4, which is presumably going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting to explain how Peter Parker got over his bout of Thanos-induced “not feeling so good” from the end of the last movie. (Admittedly, Avengers: Infinity War landed while Black Panther was still in theaters, too, but BP wasn’t the seismic shift that Avengers 4 is expected to be.)
Still, casting details for Far From Home suggest that the MCU will at least be slightly cleaned up and dusted by the time Pete comes back; Marisa Tomei, Jacob Batalon, and Michael Keaton are all expected to return from the first film, alongside Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury—last seen wrestling with a beeper on the streets of New York—and Cobie Smulders’ Maria Hill.