Disney+ dates: Star Wars: The Bad Batch out to play early, Loki’s mischief-making delayed a bit

Today at the Disney+ Television Critics Association winter press tour, the streamer got even more specific about the release dates for some previously announced Star Wars and Marvel Studios series.

Ahead of a first-ever TCA tour conversation with Kevin Feige, the President of Marvel Studios and Chief Creative Officer of Marvel, the studio announced a month’s delay for the Loki series premiere, bumping the show to June 11. But the Lucasfilm Animation series, Star Wars: The Bad Batch, set in the immediate aftermath of the Clone War, will premiere on May 4. A definite early gift for the Star Wars fans for them to drop it on Star Wars Day, dubbed thusly by Lucasfilm and Star Wars fans — and “May the 4th be with you” too, Disney+.

Star Wars: The Bad Batch series were previously announced in July 2020 and nothing has changed in the interim about the logline which sees the squad of “elite and experimental clones of the Bad Batch” figuring out their post war lives. It’s executive produced by Dave Filoni (The Clone Wars and The Mandalorian) along with Athena Portillo and Brad Rau of Star Wars: Rebels and Jennifer Corbett of Star Wars Resistance. The exact number of episodes was not revealed.

And with the massively successful roll-out of their first Marvel Cinematic Universe series, WandaVision, Disney+ will keep the new stories rolling with the six-episode series, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which debuts on March 19. It too will see weekly episode releases on subsequent Fridays.

Then there will be a gap of scripted episodic Marvel Studios series in May until June 11, when the Tom Hiddleston starring Loki will premiere and release new episodes on Fridays. Picking up right where the God of Mischief left off when he bounced himself and the Tesseract out of trouble in Avengers: Endgame, the series will focus on what he's doing bouncing through time and space. Also starring Owen Wilson, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Sophia Di Martino, Wunmi Mosaku and Richard E. Grant, Loki's head writer is Michael Waldron (Rick and Morty) and Kate Herron (Sex Education) directs all of the episodes.

Other genre related release dates include Season 2 of Zenimation, the soundbath series that mixes music with classic animation scenes, which is set to premie on June 11. Pixar’s Monsters At Work series, which takes place right after the events of Monsters University, debuts July 2 and will air weekly. Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal) and James P. "Sulley" Sullivan (John Goodman) return to play the younger versions of their characters.