Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Thor: Love and Thunder have led to the MCU dominating the most anticipated summer movies of 2022 charts. After a five year hiatus from the first week of May that Marvel traditionally dominated, due to both Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame being bumped to the last week of April and Black Widow being delayed twice due to COVID-19, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness will kick off the summer movie season. Then two months later, Thor: Love and Thunder will hit theaters in July and the studio has just begun the marketing campaign for that film.
Theaters were shut down for the summer 2020 movie season meaning many of the films were either delayed, or released on streaming like Scoob!, Artemis Fowl, and The King of Staten Island. In 2021, theaters began to open but the rollout was slower as Memorial Day weekend saw the summer kicked off with A Quiet Place Part II and Cruella, with Black Widow not hitting theaters until July. However as the year went on, audiences started to return to the theaters in greater numbers as the early successes of films like The Batman and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 have set summer 2022 to hopefully be a nice return to form.