Disney+ UK: Every Marvel Movie Missing At Launch

The UK version of Disney+ has launched, but it’s missing some big Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. The same thing happened with its initial launch in the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands, though exactly what is missing varies from region to region.

Which MCU movies were missing on launch in the US was mostly down to Disney having a deal with Netflix that still hasn’t expired. Avengers: Infinity War won’t be on Disney+ in the US until June 25, 2020. That was a strange move since Avengers: Endgame was one of the big draws when Disney+ launched November 12, 2019. But while the gaps in the US launch were caused by the relatively recent Disney-Netflix deal, the gaps in the UK release come from something much further back.

When it launches in the UK, Disney+ is going to be missing The Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Spider-Man: Far From Home. Every other MCU movie is in there, and there’s a pattern to the ones that are missing: distribution rights, which have plagued the MCU since the beginning and Marvel as a whole since the 1990s.

Back in 1996, as the comic industry was collapsing from the speculator bubble bursting, Marvel was in such dire straits that it had to declare bankruptcy. Part of what allowed them to recover from this was licensing out characters to movie studios. This led to the large number of Marvel movies released in the late-90s/early-00s, with the Spider-Man and X-Men series being the most prominent. The problem is that many of these agreements never expired. Until Disney bought 20th Century Fox, the studio still held the Fantastic Four and X-Men licenses. Sony still holds the Spider-Man license, and while the exact state of rights to Hulk is unclear, at least some of it is still held by Universal (alongside possibly Namor the Submariner, a long-rumored MCU character).

Even with those omissions, Disney+ is launching with a pretty complete MCU library in the UK. The Incredible Hulk does connect to the wider MCU, but is still one of the least important movies to the MCU overall, with Marvel recasting Bruce Banner from Edward Norton to Mark Ruffalo. There have been a couple of characters from that movie appearing in later MCU projects, in the form of William Hurt’s Thunderbolt Ross and Martin Starr reappearing in the Spider-Man movies as a teacher, Roger Harrington.

Spider-Man is a bigger miss, as Peter Parker plays such a big role in Captain America: Civil War, Infinity War, and Endgame. Disney and Sony have notoriously not gotten along very well, and it’s already been said that there are no plans for the Spider-Man movies to appear on Disney+. Since a falling out after Avengers: Endgame almost ended their shaky partnership until a new Spider-Man deal could be struck, it doesn’t look like that’s going to be changing anytime soon. They’re not the most skippable movies, but don’t leave such a glaring hole as missing something like one of the main Avengers movies would. All things considered, the UK launch of Disney+ has a strong collection of MCU movies. While it would be nice to have a full collection in one place, just missing the couple of movies caught up in a distribution mess still gives a pretty complete look at everything in the MCU.