The year is 3025. The MCU is celebrating the release of its 1,056th film in theaters, and people are still Googling if it’ll stream exclusively on Disney+++ (the additional pluses were added after the absorption of Hulu and ESPN+ into the streaming service). But let’s rewind to the second week of November 2022, a.k.a. the present, a.k.a. the release date of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, a movie people (probably you) are frantically Googling about. Why wouldn’t you be? It’s a high-profile, hotly anticipated Marvel sequel, and (not to get ahead of ourselves) it is shaping up to probably be the best movie to emerge from Marvel’s wonky Phase Four. So if that isn’t enough to signal to you how much it’s worth to Disney, we’ll just say plainly that Wakanda Forever will be exclusively in theaters on November 11.
Yes, the early days of the pandemic made movie-release scheduling rather weird — from pushing back dates and production to entertainment companies dropping their big movies onto streaming services — but since Disney and Marvel’s one-and-done streaming experiment with Black Widow, MCU movies have consistently gone straight to theaters first. Wakanda Forever will eventually come to Disney+, since Disney has been adding its movies to the streamer at least 45 days after their release, but recent Marvel films specifically have tended to take a bit longer: Thor: Love & Thunder hit streaming 64 days its theatrical debut, while Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness took 47 and Eternals took 68. At that rate, plan to wait until early 2023. Google search answered.