In retrospect, The Avengers almost seems quaint. What was one of the biggest swings in franchise filmmaking—an interconnected universe of blockbuster films—was relatively small compared to how the MCU expanded. You only had five solo films—Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger—before you brought everyone together for a six-person team in the Battle of New York in The Avengers, a film that came out four years after the first Iron Man.
The MCU is much bigger now than it was back in 2012, and so the notion that you can bring “everyone” together is a tall order, and likely will take more than four years if you’re just looking at all the groundwork being laid in Phase 4. It’s possible that The Avengers 5 will happen around 2025 (four years after Phase 4 began with Black Widow), but during a conversation for the upcoming Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings Collider's Steve Weintraub asked Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige about when the next team-up might be, and he sounded far more circumspect about the prospect:
“I think we want there to be a reasonable amount of time from the Endgame to start a new saga, which is already underway and already started,” said Feige. “And then you need time, as you did in Phase 1, to build that saga before you start bringing everyone together.”
Keep in mind that the notion of team-ups is very different now than it was in Phase 1. In Phase 1 and Phase 2, MCU characters still mostly kept to their own movies, but now crossovers are what’s happening with Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) and Loki (Tom Hiddleston) slated to appear in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness and Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) showing up before that in Spider-Man: No Way Home. To put it another way, if you want to see these characters cross-pollinate, you don’t need to wait for a new Avengers movie to see it happen.
Marvel is also likely aware that Avengers: Endgame was a tough act to follow, so rather than try to outdo it and come up short, it’s better to take a breather, reset, and let the anticipation build among the fans for when a new team of Avengers will come together to battle a new threat.
