China: After a three-and-a-half-year delay that cost Disney hundreds of millions in ticket sales, China has removed its de facto restriction on Marvel movies, with superhero movies Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania both securing surprise release dates.

The movies will be released in February 2023 after the Chinese New Year, making them the first Marvel movies to be released in the second-largest theatrical market since Avengers: Endgame in 2019. Regulators at the China Film Administration, a division of the Chinese Communist party’s propaganda department, decide whether or not foreign film releases are permitted. To uphold censorship and defend the domestic film industry, the CFA often prohibits the release of foreign films.

Marvel movies have been banned since mid-2019, but the CFA has never provided an explanation. The inclusion of LGBTQ+ characters and patriotic US symbols like the Statue of Liberty, the hiring of the Eternals director Chloé Zhao, who received criticism for comments she made about her home country in interviews, and rising political tension between the US and China are just a few of the reasons that analysts of the film industry have suggested as potential causes over the years.

Marvel films have been box office hits in China in the past: the first Black Panther earned $105 million in China in 2018, while Ant-Man and the Wasp grossed $121.2 million that same year, per the report.

However, since 2019, China has prohibited the release of movies including Black Widow, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Eternals, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Thor: Love and Thunder.

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