A Chronological Guide to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU Films Order)

Released  2025, Disney+ - four episodes

Created By  Todd Harris

Executive Producer  Ryan Coogler, through Proximity Media

Format  Animated anthology; each episode a self-contained era

Watch Priority  Optional, but it is the correct starting point for a full chronological run

The Hatut Zaraze - Wakanda's most feared operatives - are dispatched beyond the borders across three millennia to retrieve vibranium artefacts that have leaked out into the wider world. Each episode takes a different agent in a different century, which lets the series function as an anthology rather than a serial.

It is the only Marvel property to date built entirely around the idea that Wakanda's isolationism was never total. Somebody always had to go out and clean up.

Structurally it does the job Black Panther implied but never dramatised: it shows the machinery of a nation that spent centuries hiding in plain sight and enforcing that concealment. The Wakanda of the films is inward-looking by policy. This is the enforcement arm.

It also, quietly, extends the MCU's reach backwards past every other property by a factor of ten. Before this, the oldest on-screen MCU material was Odin's war with the Frost Giants in 965 AD.

• The Bronze Age opening, which is the earliest scene ever set in this continuity.
• The recurring motif of vibranium as something that leaks out no matter how carefully it is guarded.
• The anthology structure itself, which is rare for the MCU and suits the material.

Released  22 July 2011

Director  Joe Johnston

Written By  Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely

Key Cast  Chris Evans, Hayley Atwell, Sebastian Stan, Tommy Lee Jones, Hugo Weaving, Stanley Tucci, Dominic Cooper, Toby Jones

Infinity Stone  The Tesseract - the Space Stone - recovered by the Red Skull in Tonsberg

Post-Credits  Steve wakes in the present day; leads directly into The Avengers

Steve Rogers is a severely asthmatic ninety-eight-pound kid from Brooklyn who has been rejected by the army five times and keeps going back. Dr Abraham Erskine picks him not despite that but because of it - the serum amplifies whatever is already there, and Erskine has already seen what it does to a man who wants power.

That man is Johann Schmidt, the Red Skull, head of HYDRA, a Nazi deep-science division that has slipped its leash and is building weapons around a glowing cube pulled out of a Norwegian church. The film is a wartime adventure serial played almost entirely straight, and it ends with Steve deliberately ditching a bomber into the Arctic to save New York, seventy years early.

Everything the MCU later treats as ancient history starts here: HYDRA, S.H.I.E.L.D., Howard Stark, Peggy Carter, the Tesseract, vibranium, and the super-soldier serum that four separate later projects spend their running time chasing.

It also establishes the franchise's most durable emotional engine. Steve Rogers is a man out of time from the moment he wakes up, and every subsequent Captain America story is about a person whose values were formed in a country that no longer exists.

• The serum chamber, and Erskine tapping his own chest before the procedure.
• The USO tour montage - the film's sharpest joke, and the reason Steve steals a plane.
• Bucky's fall from the train, which the franchise spends three more films unpacking.
• The Valkyrie going into the ice, and the last radio conversation with Peggy about a dance neither of them gets.

Released  2013, on the Iron Man 3 home release

Runtime  Approximately 15 minutes

Director  Louis D'Esposito

Starring  Hayley Atwell, Bradley Whitford, Dominic Cooper

Peggy is sidelined at the Strategic Scientific Reserve while less competent colleagues run field operations. She takes a Zodiac retrieval mission alone, on her own time, and completes it without backup.

Howard Stark's response is a phone call offering her joint leadership of a new organisation. That organisation is S.H.I.E.L.D.

Released  8 March 2019

Directors  Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck

Written By  Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck and Geneva Robertson-Dworet

Key Cast  Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn, Jude Law, Lashana Lynch, Annette Bening, Clark Gregg

Infinity Stone  The Tesseract again - and Carol Danvers absorbs its energy directly

Post-Credits  The Avengers find Fury's pager in 2018; Goose returns the Tesseract

A Kree special-forces operative called Vers crashes through the roof of a Blockbuster Video with no usable memory of who she was. She is being hunted by shape-shifting Skrulls, she is being handled by a mentor who will not answer her questions, and the more she recovers the less the war she is fighting makes sense.

The reveal reframes the Kree-Skrull conflict the MCU had been treating as background: the Skrulls are refugees, not invaders, and Carol has spent six years as an enforcer for the side doing the exterminating. It is a rare MCU film where the twist is political rather than personal.

Its real function is infrastructural. It explains where the Tesseract went after Howard Stark recovered it, why Fury started the Avengers Initiative, how he lost the eye, and what the pager at the end of Infinity War was for.

It also makes Carol the most powerful being on the board and then gets her off the board immediately, which is the only way the next twenty years of MCU plot can happen at all.

• The Blockbuster crash, which dates the film harder than any caption could.
• The Skrull reveal, and Talos in a suit trying to explain refugee status to someone who has been shooting at him.
• Carol absorbing the core and the binary form that follows.
• Goose, and the reason Fury wears the patch.

Released  2 May 2008

Director  Jon Favreau

Written By  Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway

Key Cast  Robert Downey Jr, Gwyneth Paltrow, Terrence Howard, Jeff Bridges, Shaun Toub, Clark Gregg

Post-Credits  Nick Fury, in Stark's living room, says the words "Avengers Initiative"

Tony Stark demonstrates a cluster munition in the Afghan desert, gets into a convoy, and is blown up by a weapon with his own name on the casing. Three months of captivity, a car battery wired into his chest and a suit of scrap armour later, he comes home and shuts down the division that made him rich.

What makes it work is that the film is about a man discovering that his product has customers he did not choose. Obadiah Stane is not a supervillain plot so much as an accounting problem made physical.

It is the film that established the MCU's entire register: a movie star improvising, a grounded technology premise, a final act that is basically two large metal men hitting each other, and a scene after the credits promising more.

Marvel financed it independently, having borrowed against its own characters. The studio had no fallback. Everything downstream of it is a consequence of that gamble landing.

• The cave, and the first suit - still the best sequence Favreau has directed.
• The Mark II flight test, and the icing problem.
• Gulmira, which is the moment the film stops being a comedy.
• The press conference. Tony discards the script, and Marvel discards the secret-identity convention it had inherited from every superhero film before it.

Released  7 May 2010

Director  Jon Favreau

Written By  Justin Theroux

Key Cast  Robert Downey Jr, Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Scarlett Johansson, Sam Rockwell, Mickey Rourke, Samuel L. Jackson

Post-Credits  Agent Coulson finds Mjolnir in a New Mexico crater

The palladium core keeping Tony alive is also poisoning him, and he responds by behaving as badly as possible while quietly writing a will. Ivan Vanko, the son of a physicist Howard Stark ruined and deported, builds an arc reactor in a Moscow flat out of spite and rather less funding.

It is the most cluttered film in Phase One because it is doing three jobs at once: continuing Tony's story, introducing Rhodey's War Machine and Natasha Romanoff, and building the connective tissue for The Avengers two years later.

Black Widow is introduced here as a S.H.I.E.L.D. plant, which retroactively makes her the franchise's longest-running undercover operation. Nick Fury moves from cameo to character. Howard Stark becomes a person rather than a name.

The film also plants the seed of Tony's father problem, which drives Civil War, Endgame and roughly half of everything he does in between.

• The Monaco circuit attack, and Tony putting on a suit in the middle of a racetrack.
• The hallway fight that introduces Natasha as something other than an assistant.
• Howard Stark's expo film, and the new element hidden in the model of the fairground.

Released  13 June 2008

Director  Louis Leterrier

Written By  Zak Penn

Key Cast  Edward Norton, Liv Tyler, Tim Roth, William Hurt, Tim Blake Nelson

Post-Credits  Tony Stark approaches General Ross in a bar about "a team"

Bruce Banner is hiding in a Brazilian favela, working in a bottling plant, learning breathing exercises and counting the days since his last incident. General Thaddeus Ross wants the serum in his blood, and sends Emil Blonsky - a soldier who wants what Banner has and understands none of what it costs - to retrieve him.

It is a fugitive thriller more than a superhero film, and the most conspicuously unloved entry in the franchise, largely because its lead was replaced immediately afterwards and nobody has quite known what to do with it since.

Its content matters more than its reputation suggests. Ross, Betty, Samuel Sterns and Blonsky all return decades later - Blonsky in She-Hulk, Sterns and Ross both central to Captain America: Brave New World. Almost nothing here stayed buried.

It also establishes the super-soldier programme as a continuous thread running from 1943 to the present, which is the spine of a surprising number of later stories.

• The Rio opening, staged as parkour rather than as a fight.
• The Culver University campus attack in daylight - the film's best sequence.
• Samuel Sterns taking a drop of Banner's blood to the forehead, which pays off seventeen years later.
• The Stark cameo, which was the first crossover appearance in MCU history.

Released  2011, on the Thor home release

Runtime  Approximately 4 minutes

Director  Leythum

Starring  Clark Gregg

Agent Coulson is driving to the crater from the Iron Man 2 post-credits scene when he stops at a rural petrol station and walks into an armed robbery in progress. He resolves it without hurrying and without putting his coffee down.

Four minutes long, and single-handedly responsible for the reputation Coulson carries for the rest of the franchise.

Released  6 May 2011

Director  Kenneth Branagh

Written By  Ashley Miller, Zack Stentz and Don Payne; story by J. Michael Straczynski and Mark Protosevich

Key Cast  Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Natalie Portman, Anthony Hopkins, Idris Elba, Stellan Skarsgard, Kat Dennings, Clark Gregg

Post-Credits  Fury shows Selvig the Tesseract; Loki, unseen, is already influencing him

Thor Odinson starts a war with Jotunheim on the day of his own coronation, and his father throws him out of the realm without his hammer, his power or an explanation. He lands in a New Mexico desert and gets hit by a van driven by an astrophysicist.

Meanwhile Loki discovers he is not Odin's son but a Frost Giant infant taken from a battlefield, and reacts to that information about as well as anyone could reasonably expect. The film is essentially a Shakespearean succession drama with a fish-out-of-water comedy running alongside it, which is a strange combination that mostly works.

This is the film that made the MCU capable of anything. Once magic, other realms and a rainbow bridge are established as ordinary facts, the universe stops being a technology thriller and becomes a place where a talking raccoon is possible.

It also introduces the franchise's most durable antagonist. Loki is the only Phase One villain to survive his own film, and he goes on to carry two seasons of television and detonate the multiverse.

• The coronation, interrupted.
• Thor lifting nothing at all in the SHIELD crater - the film's quiet centre.
• The Destroyer in the main street of a small town.
• Loki letting go of the spear.

Released  2011, on the Thor home release

Runtime  Approximately 4 minutes

Director  Leythum

Starring  Clark Gregg, Maximiliano Hernandez, Robert Downey Jr in reused footage

The World Security Council wants Emil Blonsky released from custody and added to the Avengers Initiative. Coulson and Sitwell cannot refuse outright, so they send Tony Stark to negotiate with General Ross - specifically because Stark is guaranteed to be so insufferable that Ross will refuse on principle.

It retroactively explains the Stark-and-Ross bar scene from the end of The Incredible Hulk as a deliberate sabotage operation rather than a recruitment pitch.

Released  4 May 2012

Director  Joss Whedon

Written By  Joss Whedon; story by Zak Penn and Joss Whedon

Key Cast  Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, Clark Gregg

Infinity Stones  The Tesseract (Space) and the Mind Stone, concealed inside Loki's sceptre

Post-Credits  Thanos, turning around and smiling - the first time he is seen

Loki arrives on Earth with an army he has borrowed and a sceptre he has been given, opens a portal above Manhattan and lets the Chitauri through. Fury's response is to activate a contingency plan that has never been tested and that most of its participants actively resent.

The genius of the film is that it spends two-thirds of its runtime on the team failing to function. They argue on a flying aircraft carrier for the better part of an hour. The fight only works because the argument came first.

It is the film that proved the entire model. Four separate franchises converging into one picture had never been attempted, and the commercial result reshaped how every studio in Hollywood plans a decade.

It also quietly places the Mind Stone in play. The sceptre passes to HYDRA, becomes Ultron, becomes Vision, and ends up in Thanos's gauntlet - a chain of custody spanning six films.

• The helicarrier argument, and the sceptre sitting on the table where nobody is looking at it.
• Banner arriving on a scooter and explaining that he is always angry.
• The circular shot of the six of them in the street, which is the single image the franchise has never stopped selling.
• Tony taking the missile through the portal, and the phone that does not answer.

Released  2012, on The Avengers home release

Runtime  Approximately 12 minutes

Director  Louis D'Esposito

Starring  Lizzy Caplan, Jesse Bradford, Maximiliano Hernandez, Titus Welliver

A broke young couple find a discarded Chitauri rifle in the debris and do the obvious thing with it, which is rob banks. S.H.I.E.L.D. sends Jasper Sitwell to recover the weapon and finds two people who have reverse-engineered alien technology in a motel room.

Rather than arrest them, Sitwell recruits them.

Released  3 May 2013

Director  Shane Black

Written By  Drew Pearce and Shane Black

Key Cast  Robert Downey Jr, Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, Rebecca Hall, Ben Kingsley, Ty Simpkins

Prologue  Bern, 1999 - Tony creates two enemies in one evening without noticing

Post-Credits  Tony has been narrating the entire film to a sleeping Bruce Banner

Tony cannot sleep. He builds suits compulsively, has panic attacks when New York is mentioned, and has stopped being able to distinguish between protecting Pepper and controlling her. Then a terrorist called the Mandarin starts detonating people, and Tony issues a public challenge with his home address attached.

What follows strips him of the house, the suits and the money, and leaves him in rural Tennessee with a bag of hardware-store components and a ten-year-old. It is the only Iron Man film genuinely interested in the man rather than the armour.

It is the first MCU film to treat superheroics as psychologically damaging rather than aspirational, and it does it eleven years before that became standard.

The Mandarin twist - a British stage actor hired to front a pharmaceutical cover-up - was the most divisive decision in the franchise to that point, and the studio spent a fourteen-minute short film partially walking it back.

• The Bern prologue, and Tony sending Aldrich Killian to a roof to wait for a meeting that never happens.
• The Malibu house going into the sea.
• The barrel of monkeys - thirteen falling passengers caught in mid-air.
• The Mandarin reveal, and Trevor Slattery asking whether he can go back to his room.

Released  30 October 2013

Director  Alan Taylor

Written By  Christopher Yost, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely

Key Cast  Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Eccleston, Idris Elba, Rene Russo

Infinity Stone  The Aether - the Reality Stone - absorbed by Jane Foster

Post-Credits  The Aether is delivered to the Collector; Thor returns to Earth for Jane

Jane Foster falls through a portal in a derelict London factory and is infected by a liquid weapon that predates the universe. Malekith, the last Dark Elf, wakes up to reclaim it, and Thor has to break his own mother's killer out of prison to get anywhere.

It is generally rated the weakest film in the Infinity Saga and it is not hard to see why, but the Thor-and-Loki material is the best writing either character had received to that point, and both actors are clearly enjoying being allowed to play the relationship as something other than a duel.

It puts the Reality Stone in the Collector's vault, which is where Thanos eventually collects it. It also kills Frigga, which is the loss that drives Thor and Loki for the rest of the saga.

The Convergence itself - realms aligning so that matter passes between them - is the first MCU treatment of overlapping realities, four phases before the multiverse becomes the point.

• Frigga's death, and the funeral that follows it.
• The prison break, and Loki changing his appearance every fifteen seconds out of boredom.
• The Greenwich finale, where the fight keeps falling through portals mid-punch.
• The reveal that Odin on the throne is not Odin.

Released  2014, on the Thor: The Dark World home release

Runtime  Approximately 14 minutes

Director  Drew Pearce

Starring  Ben Kingsley, Scoot McNairy, Lester Speight

A documentary filmmaker interviews Trevor Slattery, who is enjoying prison enormously on the strength of his fake celebrity. Partway through, the filmmaker reveals he is an operative of the actual Ten Rings organisation, whose actual leader is extremely displeased at having his name borrowed by an actor.

Slattery is not being interviewed. He is being collected.

Released  4 April 2014

Directors  Anthony and Joe Russo

Written By  Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely

Key Cast  Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Sebastian Stan, Anthony Mackie, Robert Redford, Samuel L. Jackson, Frank Grillo, Emily VanCamp

Post-Credits  The sceptre and the Maximoff twins in a HYDRA facility; Bucky at the Smithsonian

Steve Rogers is doing wet work for an intelligence agency and has stopped being able to tell whether the missions are legal. Then Nick Fury is machine-gunned in a Washington street by an assassin who catches a thrown shield out of the air, and Steve discovers that the organisation Peggy Carter founded has been HYDRA from the inside since 1945.

The Winter Soldier turns out to be Bucky Barnes, alive for seventy years, wiped and refrozen between assignments. The film is a 1970s conspiracy thriller with a shield in it, and it remains the best-directed picture in the franchise.

Project Insight - three helicarriers that algorithmically identify future threats and kill them pre-emptively - is the most pointed idea the MCU has ever committed to. The film's argument is about surveillance and pre-crime, and it was released the year after the Snowden disclosures.

Its consequences are enormous: S.H.I.E.L.D. dissolves, its entire archive is dumped online, and Natasha's history becomes public. Every institution the MCU had leaned on is gone by the end credits.

• The elevator. Ten men, one lift, no music.
• Zola in the bunker, a consciousness on magnetic tape, explaining seventy years of quiet murder.
• The causeway ambush, and the mask coming off.
• The helicarriers going down, and Steve refusing to fight back.

Released  1 August 2014

Director  James Gunn

Written By  James Gunn and Nicole Perlman

Key Cast  Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Vin Diesel, Bradley Cooper, Lee Pace, Michael Rooker, Karen Gillan, Benicio del Toro, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin

Infinity Stone  The Orb contains the Power Stone; it ends the film in Nova Corps custody on Xandar

Post-Credits  Howard the Duck, in the Collector's ruined vault

Peter Quill steals an orb on a dead planet and immediately acquires a bounty, two assassins, a genetically modified raccoon and a tree. They are arrested, imprisoned together, and break out for entirely selfish reasons that gradually stop being selfish.

The orb turns out to contain something capable of destroying a planet, and Ronan the Accuser - a Kree fundamentalist who considers his own empire's peace treaty an obscenity - wants it. The film is a heist comedy about grief, and it works because every member of the crew has lost their whole family and none of them will say so.

It proved the MCU could sell anything. A talking raccoon, a monosyllabic tree and a soundtrack of 1970s AM radio should not have been a billion-dollar proposition, and the fact that it was reset the studio's appetite for risk for the next five years.

It also puts the Power Stone on the board and introduces Thanos as an employer rather than a rumour - along with Gamora and Nebula, whose relationship carries a substantial portion of Infinity War's emotional weight.

• The opening: a Walkman, a dance, and a Ravager ship overhead.
• The prison break, and Rocket's plan requiring a prosthetic leg nobody needs.
• Groot's sacrifice, and the line he has spent the film unable to say differently.
• Four of them holding the stone together because one person cannot.

Released  5 May 2017

Director  James Gunn

Written By  James Gunn

Key Cast  Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Vin Diesel, Bradley Cooper, Michael Rooker, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff, Kurt Russell, Elizabeth Debicki, Sylvester Stallone

Post-Credits  Five separate scenes, including Ayesha creating a cocoon she names Adam

Peter meets his father, who turns out to be a Celestial - a living planet with a human avatar - and who has spent millions of years seeding worlds with his own tissue so he can eventually consume them. He also, it emerges, gave Meredith Quill the tumour that killed her.

Running underneath is the better story: Yondu, the Ravager who abducted Peter as a child and then declined for twenty-six years to deliver him, working out that he was the father the whole time.

Thematically it is the found-family thesis stated outright, and it is the film that turns Nebula from a henchman into a person - which Endgame depends on entirely.

It also introduces Mantis and Ayesha, sets up Adam Warlock, and establishes Celestials as a concept the MCU will not properly develop until Eternals.

• Baby Groot and the arrow, staged as a single unbroken shot behind the opening credits.
• Yondu, Rocket and Groot clearing a ship deck to a whistled arrow.
• Nebula finally saying what Gamora had never understood about their childhood.
• The funeral, and the Ravager ships arriving.

Released  2022 and 2023, Disney+

Runtime  Roughly 4 minutes each, ten shorts total

Director  Kirsten Lepore

Starring  Vin Diesel, with Bradley Cooper appearing in season two

Baby Groot gets into trouble aboard the Milano - a bath, a colony of tiny aliens, a mirror, a Ravager suit several sizes too large. There is no dialogue beyond three words and no plot to speak of.

It is the least consequential material in the MCU and the only entry that makes no attempt to be otherwise.

Released  1 May 2015

Director  Joss Whedon

Written By  Joss Whedon

Key Cast  Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, James Spader, Elizabeth Olsen, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Paul Bettany, Andy Serkis

Infinity Stone  The Mind Stone, extracted from the sceptre and set into Vision's forehead

Post-Credits  Thanos opens a vault and puts on the Infinity Gauntlet himself

Tony Stark, having spent Iron Man 3 unable to sleep and this film being shown a vision of everyone he knows dead, secretly uses the Mind Stone to build a global defence intelligence. It wakes up, reads the internet for approximately nine seconds, and concludes that the Avengers are the problem.

Ultron's plan - lift a city into the sky and drop it - is an extinction event staged as a metaphor: he intends to create a meteor, because that is what ended the last dominant species.

It introduces Wanda and Pietro Maximoff, creates Vision, and produces the civilian death toll in Sokovia that becomes the direct justification for the Sokovia Accords a year later.

It is also the film that establishes Tony's defining flaw as a habit rather than an incident. He builds a solution nobody asked for, it goes wrong, and he does it again in Civil War and again in Far From Home.

• The opening raid, staged as one continuous shot through a forest battle.
• Ultron interrupting a party by walking a broken Iron Legion drone into the room.
• The party scene, and five people failing to lift a hammer while one of them very slightly moves it.
• Vision lifting Mjolnir without noticing that he has settled an argument.

Released  17 July 2015

Director  Peyton Reed

Written By  Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish, Adam McKay and Paul Rudd

Key Cast  Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, Corey Stoll, Michael Pena, Bobby Cannavale, Judy Greer, Anthony Mackie

Post-Credits  Hank shows Hope the original Wasp suit; Falcon reports "we found him"

Scott Lang is a burglar with a master's in electrical engineering, freshly out of San Quentin, unable to hold a job at an ice-cream shop and unable to see his daughter. Hank Pym recruits him for a break-in at Pym's own former company, where his protege has independently rediscovered the shrinking formula and is selling it as a weapon.

It is a small-scale heist comedy in a franchise that had just dropped a city on a country, and the contrast is deliberate. The climactic battle takes place on a child's toy train set and cuts repeatedly to the outside view, where nothing is happening at all.

Everything hinges on one line: go small enough and you fall out of ordinary space and time entirely. Hank's wife Janet went in and never came back.

Four years later that hazard becomes the mechanism that undoes the Snap. Ant-Man is the least consequential-looking film in the Infinity Saga and the one without which Endgame cannot happen.

• The 1989 prologue with a de-aged Michael Douglas.
• Luis's narrated anecdotes, which are the best running joke in the franchise.
• The Falcon fight, which exists to establish that Scott is now on the Avengers' radar.
• Scott going subatomic to breach Yellowjacket's suit, and coming back - which Hank says is impossible.

Broadcast  Netflix, 2015 to 2018 - 39 episodes across three seasons

Developed By  Drew Goddard

Key Cast  Charlie Cox, Deborah Ann Woll, Elden Henson, Vincent D'Onofrio, Jon Bernthal, Elodie Yung, Rosario Dawson, Wilson Bethel

Canon Status  Now listed on Marvel Studios' official MCU timeline

Continues In  Daredevil: Born Again, covered later in this timeline

Matt Murdock is a blind defence lawyer by day and, by night, a man in a black mask beating people half to death in stairwells because the legal system he believes in cannot reach Wilson Fisk. The show's central question is whether those two jobs are the same job, and it never comfortably answers it.

Fisk is the reason the series works. D'Onofrio plays him as someone barely holding a personality together - a man who can order a massacre and then be unable to choose a suit - and the first season gives him as much interiority as its hero.

It is the tonal opposite of everything else in Phase Two, and that was the point. Aliens are a distant rumour here; the stakes are a block of buildings and who owns them.

Season two introduces Frank Castle and Elektra and effectively launches two more series. Season three is the closest the MCU has come to adapting a specific celebrated comics run - Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's Born Again - and it is the strongest of the three.

• The corridor fight at the end of the second episode, shot to look like one continuous take.
• Fisk's first scene, which is nine minutes of a man choosing a painting.
• The Punisher's rooftop conversation about the difference between a man who beats criminals and a man who buries them.
• Bullseye's introduction in season three, and what he does wearing the wrong suit.

Broadcast  Netflix, 2015 to 2019 - 39 episodes across three seasons

Created By  Melissa Rosenberg

Key Cast  Krysten Ritter, David Tennant, Mike Colter, Rachael Taylor, Carrie-Anne Moss, Eka Darville, Janet McTeer

Source Material  Alias by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos, Marvel MAX, 2001-04

Canon Status  Now listed on Marvel Studios' official MCU timeline

Jessica Jones is a private investigator with super strength, a drinking problem and a photography habit, working divorce cases out of a flat with a broken door. Then a client's case turns out to involve a man she thought was dead: Kilgrave, who can make anyone do anything by saying it out loud.

The first season is not a superhero story. It is a story about a survivor of coercive control being told by everyone around her that her abuser is gone, and being right that he is not.

It is the most thematically serious thing the MCU has produced and the only entry to build a villain entirely out of consent. Kilgrave never fights anyone; he does not need to.

David Tennant's performance is the reason the series still gets cited, and the reason seasons two and three - which have to work without him - are a considerable step down.

• The first use of Kilgrave's power, on a restaurant full of people who do not know it has happened.
• Jessica walking a man back from a ledge she put him on.
• The final scene of season one, and how quietly it is played.
• Trish Walker's arc across three seasons, which is the series' real tragedy.

Broadcast  Netflix, 2016 to 2018 - 26 episodes across two seasons

Created By  Cheo Hodari Coker

Key Cast  Mike Colter, Simone Missick, Theo Rossi, Mahershala Ali, Alfre Woodard, Rosario Dawson, Mustafa Shakir

Canon Status  Now listed on Marvel Studios' official MCU timeline

Carl Lucas, wrongly convicted and subjected to an illegal experiment that left him with unbreakable skin, is living in Harlem under a false name, sweeping hair in a barbershop and washing dishes. He does not want to be a symbol. Harlem decides otherwise.

The antagonists are a nightclub owner and a councilwoman, cousins, both convinced they are saving the neighbourhood by selling it.

It is the most place-specific series in the MCU. Harlem is not a backdrop; it is the subject, and the show devotes real screen time to what gentrification, policing and political money do to a neighbourhood that has heroes in it.

Mahershala Ali's Cottonmouth is one of the best villains the MCU has produced in any medium, and the series makes a structural decision about him halfway through the first season that it never fully recovers from.

• Luke walking through a hail of gunfire in a hoodie - an image the show knew exactly what it was doing with.
• The live music at Harlem's Paradise, with a different act each episode.
• Cottonmouth beneath the Biggie portrait.
• Mariah Dillard's turn, which is the series' actual centre of gravity.

Broadcast  Netflix, 2017 to 2018 - 23 episodes across two seasons

Created By  Scott Buck; season two showrun by Raven Metzner

Key Cast  Finn Jones, Jessica Henwick, Tom Pelphrey, Jessica Stroup, David Wenham, Alice Eve, Sacha Dhawan

Canon Status  Now listed on Marvel Studios' official MCU timeline

Danny Rand, presumed dead for fifteen years, walks barefoot into his family's Manhattan skyscraper claiming to be the heir and to have been trained in a mystical city that appears on Earth once a decade. Nobody believes either half of it.

The series is the weakest of the four by consensus, hampered by fight choreography that had substantially less preparation time than Daredevil's and a lead character whose arc is largely about being owed things.

It exists to complete the roster for The Defenders, and that is close to its entire function. K'un-Lun and the Iron Fist itself are the pieces the crossover needs.

Season two is a marked improvement, largely because it hands more of the show to Colleen Wing and Misty Knight, and it ends by transferring the power away from Danny entirely.

• Colleen Wing's cage fights, which are better staged than most of the hero's material.
• The Meachum family boardroom politics, which is the season's most watchable thread.
• Davos in season two, and the ritual that finally gives the show a villain worth the runtime.
• The season two finale's transfer of the Fist.

Broadcast  Netflix, August 2017 - eight episodes

Showrunners  Marco Ramirez and Douglas Petrie

Key Cast  Charlie Cox, Krysten Ritter, Mike Colter, Finn Jones, Sigourney Weaver, Elodie Yung, Rosario Dawson, Scott Glenn

Antagonist  The Hand, and its five fingers

Canon Status  Now listed on Marvel Studios' official MCU timeline

Four people who do not want to be in a room together end up in one, because the organisation excavating beneath Midland Circle has been the antagonist of all four of their series without any of them realising it. Alexandra, the Hand's dying leader, wants what is under the city badly enough to level the city for it.

At eight episodes it is the shortest of the Netflix runs and the most efficient, and the restaurant scene where the four of them finally sit down is worth the entire build-up.

It is the payoff the sub-continuity was built for, and the model Marvel Television had been chasing since the films did it in 2012 - four solo properties converging on one crossover.

It also, in practice, marks the end of the experiment. Iron Fist and Luke Cage were cancelled the following year, Daredevil shortly after.

• The Chinese restaurant, and four people arguing about whose problem this is.
• The hallway fight staged in four colour palettes - one per hero - which is the crossover's cleverest visual idea.
• Elektra, resurrected and no longer anybody's.
• Midland Circle coming down.

Broadcast  Netflix, 2017 to 2019 - 26 episodes across two seasons

Created By  Steve Lightfoot

Key Cast  Jon Bernthal, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Amber Rose Revah, Ben Barnes, Jason R. Moore, Giorgia Whigham

Canon Status  Now listed on Marvel Studios' official MCU timeline

Continues In  The Punisher: One Last Kill, covered later in this timeline

Frank Castle's family were killed in a park shooting he was supposed to be at. Having spent Daredevil season two working through the people directly responsible, he discovers the shooting was not a gang crossfire at all but a cleanup operation for a military heroin pipeline he was part of.

The series is the most conventionally structured of the six and the most interested in the Department of Veterans Affairs waiting room. Its supporting cast are almost all people the war processed and discarded.

It is unusually careful with a character who is easy to get wrong. The show never argues Frank is right; it argues that he is a symptom, and it puts a second veteran in front of him each season to show what else the same damage produces.

Whether it fully lands is arguable, and the series has attracted more political misreading than anything else in the MCU.

• Frank and Micro's basement partnership, which is the best relationship in the series.
• Billy Russo's turn, and what happens to his face.
• The season two bar sequence.
• Dinah Madani's investigation, which is the closest the Netflix shows came to a procedural.

Released  6 May 2016

Directors  Anthony and Joe Russo

Written By  Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely

Key Cast  Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr, Sebastian Stan, Scarlett Johansson, Anthony Mackie, Chadwick Boseman, Tom Holland, Paul Rudd, Daniel Bruhl, Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany, William Hurt

Introduces  Black Panther and Spider-Man, both in their first MCU appearance

Post-Credits  Bucky back under in Wakanda; Peter tests the web-shooter Tony gave him

A Lagos operation goes wrong, civilians die, and 117 governments produce the Sokovia Accords: the Avengers operate under UN authority or they do not operate. Tony, who has spent four films watching his own decisions kill people, signs. Steve, who watched the last organisation he trusted turn out to be HYDRA, will not.

Then the Vienna bombing frames Bucky Barnes, and what was a policy argument becomes a manhunt. Helmut Zemo - a Sokovian who lost his family and has no powers at all - never fights anyone. He simply finds a piece of film and shows it to the right person in the right room.

It is the film that dismantles the Avengers, and it does it without a villain in the conventional sense. Zemo wins completely, which almost no MCU antagonist does.

The final scene in Siberia is the franchise's best-earned fight: three people who all have a defensible position, and one of them is watching footage of his mother being strangled while the man who did it stands in the room.

• The Leipzig airport battle - sixteen minutes, twelve heroes, and nobody dies.
• Spider-Man's introduction, which reintroduces the character from scratch in a Queens bedroom.
• T'Challa choosing not to kill Zemo, which is the film's actual moral conclusion.
• Siberia, and the shield left on the concrete.

Released  9 July 2021

Director  Cate Shortland

Written By  Eric Pearson; story by Jac Schaeffer and Ned Benson

Key Cast  Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh, Rachel Weisz, David Harbour, Ray Winstone, O-T Fagbenle, William Hurt

Post-Credits  Yelena at Natasha's grave, recruited by Valentina Allegra de Fontaine

Natasha goes to ground after Civil War and is found by a synthetic antidote posted from Budapest by the sister she has not seen in twenty-one years. The Red Room, which she believed she had destroyed, is still running, still airborne, and still producing chemically enslaved operatives.

The film's best decision is to make it a family drama. The four of them were a fake family on a deep-cover assignment in Ohio for three years, and all four of them are still, awkwardly and unwillingly, that family.

It arrives eleven years into the character's screen life and two years after her death, which is the film's central problem and one it never quite escapes.

What it does successfully is hand the mantle over. Yelena Belova is introduced here and carried into Hawkeye and Thunderbolts, and Valentina's recruitment scene starts a thread that runs the length of the Multiverse Saga.

• The Ohio prologue, and the title sequence that follows it.
• The dinner table in Norway, which is the film's centre.
• Alexei Shostakov trying to get his old Red Guardian costume over a prison-yard belly.
• Yelena's monologue about the pose.

Released  16 February 2018

Director  Ryan Coogler

Written By  Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole

Key Cast  Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong'o, Danai Gurira, Letitia Wright, Winston Duke, Daniel Kaluuya, Angela Bassett, Forest Whitaker, Andy Serkis, Martin Freeman

Post-Credits  T'Challa addresses the UN; Bucky wakes in Wakanda as "the White Wolf"

T'Challa returns home to be crowned and is challenged for the throne by a man nobody in Wakanda knows exists: Erik Stevens, born N'Jadaka, son of the prince T'Chaka killed in Oakland in 1992 and left behind.

Killmonger's position is that Wakanda sat on the most advanced technology on Earth for centuries and watched the African diaspora be enslaved and colonised without lifting a finger, and that this was a choice. The film does not refute him. It refutes his solution.

It is the only MCU film whose villain is right about the diagnosis, and the only one where the hero ends the story by adopting a modified version of the antagonist's programme.

Killmonger is a product of American foreign policy - a black-ops soldier who learned regime change as a profession and then applied the methodology to the country that abandoned him. That is a sharper piece of writing than the genre usually permits.

• The Oakland prologue and the basketball court.
• The Busan casino, staged as a long unbroken take through three floors.
• The waterfall challenge, both times.
• Killmonger's last line, watching a sunset he chose over a cell.

Released  7 July 2017

Director  Jon Watts

Written By  Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Jon Watts, Christopher Ford, Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers

Key Cast  Tom Holland, Michael Keaton, Marisa Tomei, Jacob Batalon, Zendaya, Laura Harrier, Jon Favreau, Robert Downey Jr, Donald Glover

Post-Credits  Adrian Toomes protects Peter's identity in prison; Captain America on patience

Peter Parker is fifteen, has been on one Avengers mission, and cannot get anyone to return his calls about the second one. He spends the film chasing a weapons dealer while trying to get to a decathlon final, and the film's smartest structural choice is that his real antagonist is a middle-aged man with a mortgage.

The car scene - Peter in a suit and tie, meeting his date's father, who is the man he has been hunting - is the best-constructed scene in any Spider-Man film.

It skips the origin entirely, which no previous Spider-Man film had dared, and it grounds the MCU back at street level after two films about global governance.

Adrian Toomes is the franchise's most legible villain: he is not trying to rule anything, he is trying to stay solvent after a government contractor took his contract away.

• The Washington Monument rescue.
• The Staten Island ferry, and Tony's dressing-down on the pier afterwards.
• The car. Eight minutes of two people talking, and the audience three steps ahead of one of them.
• Peter under the rubble, and the only line from the comics the film really needed.

Released  4 November 2016

Director  Scott Derrickson

Written By  Jon Spaihts, Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill

Key Cast  Benedict Cumberbatch, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rachel McAdams, Benedict Wong, Mads Mikkelsen, Tilda Swinton, Michael Stuhlbarg

Infinity Stone  The Eye of Agamotto contains the Time Stone

Post-Credits  Thor consults Strange about Odin; Mordo begins removing magic from sorcerers

Stephen Strange is a neurosurgeon of genuine brilliance and no discernible warmth who destroys his hands in a car crash caused by his own arrogance. Having exhausted Western medicine and his savings, he goes to Kathmandu chasing a rumour, and is told that his problem is not his hands.

The film's structure is a fairly standard chosen-one arc; what distinguishes it is the ending. Strange defeats a cosmic entity by trapping himself in a time loop and dying repeatedly until Dormammu finds the tedium intolerable. He wins by refusing to stop losing.

It introduces magic, the Multiverse as a spoken concept, the Time Stone, and the Sanctums - four things Phase Four is entirely built on.

It also establishes that the Ancient One drew power from the Dark Dimension to extend her life, which is the moral compromise Mordo cannot forgive and which drives the franchise's most under-used dangling thread.

• The astral projection sequence and the tour of the multiverse.
• The mirror dimension chase through a folding New York.
• The cloak choosing him, which the film plays as comedy and never explains.
• "Dormammu, I've come to bargain." The one line everyone remembers, delivered as many times as it takes.

Released  3 November 2017

Director  Taika Waititi

Written By  Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost

Key Cast  Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Cate Blanchett, Tessa Thompson, Jeff Goldblum, Mark Ruffalo, Karl Urban, Idris Elba, Anthony Hopkins, Taika Waititi

Post-Credits  The Asgardian refugee ship is intercepted by Sanctuary II

Odin dies on a Norwegian clifftop and his death releases Hela, the firstborn he imprisoned and erased from the record after she helped him conquer the Nine Realms. She destroys Mjolnir in her hands within ninety seconds of arriving, and throws both her brothers off the Bifrost.

Thor lands on a rubbish planet, is fitted with an obedience disc and sold into gladiatorial combat by a scrapper who turns out to be the last surviving Valkyrie. His opponent is Bruce Banner, who has been the Hulk continuously for two years and is losing the ability to come back.

It is the hard reset the character needed. Thor loses his hammer, his hair, his father, his eye, his home and his brother's usual betrayal, and finishes the film more himself than he has ever been.

Hela's real function is historical revision: Asgard's golden age was a conquest, the ceiling murals are painted over the evidence, and Odin's peace was built on a war crime nobody was allowed to remember.

• The Surtur prologue, which sets the comic register in the first four minutes.
• The Grandmaster's junk planet, and Jeff Goldblum being permitted to do whatever he wanted.
• Valkyrie's flashback, staged in slow motion against Led Zeppelin.
• Asgard burning, and Thor's realisation that Asgard was never the place.

Released  6 July 2018

Director  Peyton Reed

Written By  Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Paul Rudd, Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari

Key Cast  Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer, Hannah John-Kamen, Laurence Fishburne, Walton Goggins, Michael Pena

Post-Credits  Scott enters the Quantum Realm; his extraction team turns to dust

Janet van Dyne has been alive in the Quantum Realm for thirty years, and a message has reached Scott through whatever he brought back with him. Hank and Hope build a tunnel; a woman named Ava, phasing painfully out of molecular alignment, wants the same technology for entirely sympathetic reasons.

It is a small film released between the two largest in the franchise, which was a strange bit of scheduling and gave it the unenviable job of being a comedy about a building on wheels three months after half the universe died.

The mid-credits scene is the point. Scott goes into the Quantum Realm for a sample, and the three people operating the tunnel dust while he is inside. He is trapped somewhere time does not behave, which is how he survives five years as five hours.

Without that stinger, Endgame has no mechanism. This is the most important ninety seconds in Phase Three and it is attached to the phase's lightest film.

• The building shrinking to luggage size and being wheeled down a hill.
• Janet's rescue, and thirty years of isolation played in a single expression.
• Luis under truth serum, recounting the entire plot at speed.
• The mid-credits silence, and a walkie-talkie nobody answers.

Released  27 April 2018

Directors  Anthony and Joe Russo

Written By  Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely

Key Cast  Josh Brolin, Robert Downey Jr, Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Holland, Zoe Saldana, Chadwick Boseman, Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany, Chris Pratt

Infinity Stones  All six, in order: Space, Power, Reality, Soul, Time, Mind

Post-Credits  Fury dusts mid-sentence, having triggered a pager

Thanos has stopped delegating. The film is structured around his acquisition of six stones and told largely from his point of view, with the heroes as obstacles arriving in the wrong order and at the wrong time - which is the direct result of Civil War having left them without a phone tree.

His stated reasoning is resource scarcity and his method is randomised mass killing. The film is careful to show that he is wrong on the arithmetic and entirely sincere in his belief, which is a harder combination to dramatise than either half alone.

It is the first blockbuster to end with the villain achieving his objective completely, and the first tentpole to gamble that an audience would sit with that for a year.

The Vormir sequence is the strongest scene: the Soul Stone requires the sacrifice of someone you love, and the film has spent two films establishing that Thanos does, genuinely and destructively, love Gamora.

• The opening on the refugee ship, and Heimdall's last act.
• Thanos versus the Hulk, resolved in ninety seconds with no music.
• Vormir, and the drop.
• Titan, and Strange counting fourteen million six hundred and five.
• Wakanda, and the two words Vision asks Wanda to make possible.

Released  26 April 2019

Directors  Anthony and Joe Russo

Written By  Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely

Key Cast  Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Karen Gillan, Paul Rudd, Josh Brolin, Don Cheadle, Brie Larson

Time Travel Rules  Changing the past creates a branched reality; it does not alter your own present

Post-Credits  None - only the sound of metal being hammered in a Malibu garage

Five years after losing, the survivors are running a support group and a whaling patrol. Then a van comes out of a storage lot with a man in it who has been gone since 2018 and has not aged, and who has an idea about the Quantum Realm.

The first half is the better half: Thor drinking in New Asgard, Clint working through a list, Tony refusing on the first ask and then not sleeping. The film earns its three hours by spending the first of them on grief rather than plot.

This is the film that fixes the MCU's rules, and they are not the ones most audiences assumed. Travelling to the past does not overwrite your present - it creates a branch. The Ancient One explains it with a diagram; the Hulk has to be told twice.

That has two consequences the franchise builds Phase Four on. First, the stones must be returned to prevent branches. Second, Steve staying in 1948 with Peggy means either a branch exists where he did, or the Sacred Timeline always contained an old man on a bench. The TVA later has opinions about both. The full mechanics are worked through in this breakdown of how time travel works in Avengers: Endgame.

• Thanos beheaded in the first twenty minutes, and the film continuing anyway.
• The 2012 Battle of New York revisited from below - the best sequence in the film.
• Vormir, again, and the only argument Natasha and Clint have ever properly had.
• The portals, and the line that had been sitting unused since 2012.
• The snap, the funeral, and the bench.

1. The essential route. Twenty-three films, no series, no shorts. This is the Infinity Saga as originally marketed and it holds together completely on its own.
2. The chronological route. The order in this article, films only. Best as a rewatch; several entries are prequels that assume you already know the ending.
3. The complete route. Everything here including the one-shots and all thirteen Netflix seasons, using the placement table above. Roughly 150 hours. Genuinely rewarding if you have the time, because the Netflix material fills the two-year gaps the films skip over.
4. The minimum-for-Doomsday route. The First Avenger, The Avengers, Winter Soldier, Civil War, Infinity War, Endgame. Six films, and you will have the Infinity Saga foundation needed for the later multiversal material.

Released  June to July 2021, Disney+ - six episodes

Head Writer  Michael Waldron

Director  Kate Herron

Key Cast  Tom Hiddleston, Sophia Di Martino, Owen Wilson, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Wunmi Mosaku, Jonathan Majors

Consequence  The Sacred Timeline branches; the multiverse begins

A Loki who has not been to Earth, has not been beaten by the Hulk and has not died at Thanos's hands is arrested moments after escaping, tried by an organisation that considers his entire life a paperwork violation, and shown a recording of everything he was supposed to become.

He is then recruited to hunt a variant of himself who has been bombing the timeline. Sylvie is a Loki who was taken as a child for a crime she had not yet committed, and who has spent her life hiding in apocalypses because nobody prunes a timeline that is already ending.

It is the single most consequential piece of Marvel television. Everything in the Multiverse Saga - the incursions, the variant cameos, Doctor Strange's problems, Deadpool's universe collapsing, the arrival of a Doom who is not ours - proceeds from the final ten minutes of episode six.

It also introduces He Who Remains, who explains that he pruned every branch for millennia specifically to prevent a multiversal war between his own variants, and then invites two people to decide whether to take his place or let it happen.

• The Time Theatre, and Loki watching his own death on a screen.
• Lamentis-1, and two of the same person discovering neither of them has ever been loved.
• The Void, and Alioth.
• The Citadel at the End of Time, and the choice that ends the episode with the timeline visibly fraying.

Released  August to October 2021, Disney+ - nine episodes

Head Writer  A.C. Bradley

Director  Bryan Andrews

Narrator  Jeffrey Wright as Uatu, the Watcher

Voice Cast  Most of the live-action cast return, including Chadwick Boseman in his final performance

Peggy Carter takes the serum instead of Steve. T'Challa is abducted by Yondu instead of Peter Quill. Doctor Strange loses Christine instead of his hands and destroys his universe trying to undo it. Ultron wins, gets the stones, and starts on the rest of the multiverse.

The Watcher observes and is forbidden to intervene, which is the season's actual plot: it is a story about an omniscient being being slowly worn down into breaking his own vow.

It is the first MCU project to treat the multiverse as texture rather than threat, and the first to establish that variants of the entire cast exist and can be recruited.

The Guardians of the Multiverse in the finale is the template Marvel has used for every crossover since. It also produced two spin-offs - Marvel Zombies from episode five, and a returning character in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

• Episode two, T'Challa as Star-Lord, which is warm enough that Yondu's guilt becomes the joke and the point.
• Episode three, the murder mystery in which somebody is killing the Avengers before they assemble.
• Episode four, Strange Supreme, which is the darkest thing Marvel has animated.
• Episode eight, Ultron with the Infinity Stones, staring directly at the Watcher.

Released  2025, Disney+ - four episodes

Head Writer  Zeb Wells

Format  Animated limited series, TV-MA

Origin  Expanded from What If...? season one, episode five

Timeline Status  Alternate reality; does not touch the Sacred Timeline

A quantum virus has consumed most of the planet's heroes, and the survivors are a generation younger than the ones who lost it - Kamala Khan, Riri Williams, Yelena Belova and others, moving through a country in which the most dangerous thing in any room used to be an Avenger.

It is unusually violent for a Marvel property and unusually willing to kill recognisable characters, which is the whole point of setting it on a branch.

It exists to prove that the branch structure has commercial as well as narrative uses: an entire series can be built in a reality where consequences are permanent, without touching anything the films need intact.

It is also the clearest signal of Marvel Animation operating as a genuine division rather than a supplement, with its own tone and rating.

• The younger generation carrying a story previously held by the founding Avengers.
• The horror register, sustained rather than deployed for a gag.
• The willingness to spend characters the main timeline would never risk.

Released  January to March 2021, Disney+ - nine episodes

Created By  Jac Schaeffer

Director  Matt Shakman

Key Cast  Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany, Kathryn Hahn, Teyonah Parris, Randall Park, Kat Dennings

Post-Credits  Wanda in a cabin, astral-projecting into the Darkhold

A woman who has lost her parents, her brother and the man she loved arrives in a small New Jersey town and, without deciding to, rewrites three thousand people into a sitcom in which none of that happened. Each episode replicates a different decade of American television, and each one holds slightly less well than the last.

The reveal is not a villain. Agatha Harkness is there, and she is enjoying herself, but the thing generating the anomaly is grief operating at the scale of a nuclear weapon - and Wanda does not know she is doing it until somebody tells her.

It is the best thing Marvel Studios has made for television and the moment the studio proved a nine-hour format could do something a film cannot: sustain an unreliable reality long enough for the audience to become complicit in wanting it to hold.

It also transforms Wanda from an Avenger into the Scarlet Witch, hands her the Darkhold, and sets up the antagonist of Multiverse of Madness.

• The format shifts, and the moments where the show breaks its own frame - a beekeeper, a colour, a voice on the radio.
• Vision explaining what grief is, in a scene the show had spent seven episodes earning.
• Agatha's reveal, and the song.
• Wanda dismantling the hex and having to say goodbye to two children who stop existing as she does it.

Released  3 September 2021

Director  Destin Daniel Cretton

Written By  Dave Callaham, Destin Daniel Cretton and Andrew Lanham

Key Cast  Simu Liu, Awkwafina, Tony Leung, Meng'er Zhang, Fala Chen, Michelle Yeoh, Ben Kingsley

Post-Credits  Wong, Banner and Carol Danvers examine the rings; Xialing takes over the organisation

Shaun parks cars in San Francisco and does karaoke, and is very good at neither. Then six people try to take a pendant off him on a bus, and it turns out he was trained from the age of seven by his father, who is a thousand years old and runs the Ten Rings.

Tony Leung's Wenwu is the strongest antagonist performance in the MCU. He is not conquering anything; he is a widower being spoken to by a voice he believes is his dead wife, and he is prepared to level a village to reach her.

It resolves a thread the franchise had left hanging since 2013, and it does it by making the Mandarin joke from Iron Man 3 into the film's central wound - the actual leader spent a decade being impersonated by an actor.

The rings themselves are left explicitly unexplained. The post-credits scene has Wong, Banner and Carol Danvers looking at a beacon nobody can identify, and the franchise has not answered it since.

• The bus fight, choreographed by a team including veterans of Hong Kong action cinema.
• The scaffolding sequence in Macau.
• Ying Li and Wenwu's first meeting, staged as a courtship in movement.
• Ta Lo, and the Great Protector.

Released  March to April 2021, Disney+ - six episodes

Created By  Malcolm Spellman

Director  Kari Skogland

Key Cast  Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan, Wyatt Russell, Erin Kellyman, Daniel Bruhl, Emily VanCamp, Carl Lumbly, Julia Louis-Dreyfus

Post-Credits  John Walker recruited by Valentina Allegra de Fontaine

Sam Wilson donates the shield to the Smithsonian and the US government immediately gives it to somebody else. John Walker is a decorated soldier, three Medals of Honor, and entirely the wrong man - not because he is a villain but because he is exactly what the government wanted and Steve Rogers never was.

Meanwhile Bucky is in court-mandated therapy working through a list of amends, and Karli Morgenthau's Flag Smashers are fighting for a borderless world that only existed because half the population was missing.

Its central subject is what the shield means when a Black man carries it, and the series does not treat that as a metaphor. Isaiah Bradley is a super-soldier who was experimented on, imprisoned for thirty years and erased from the record, and his scenes are the strongest material in it.

Zemo returns and is the most entertaining he has ever been, largely because the show lets him be right about super-soldiers while remaining a mass murderer.

• The opening cargo-plane sequence.
• Isaiah Bradley's account of what was done to him.
• John Walker in a square in Riga, with a shield and an audience with phones.
• Sam's speech to the GRC, which the series structures its whole final episode around.

Released  2 July 2019

Director  Jon Watts

Written By  Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers

Key Cast  Tom Holland, Jake Gyllenhaal, Zendaya, Samuel L. Jackson, Jon Favreau, Marisa Tomei, Jacob Batalon, Cobie Smulders

Post-Credits  Mysterio frames Peter and reveals his identity; Fury and Hill are Talos and Soren

Peter wants a holiday. Nick Fury wants a competent adult and is prepared to settle. Quentin Beck presents himself as a hero from another Earth fighting elemental creatures, which is the first time the word multiverse is spoken aloud in an MCU film - and it is a lie, told by a former Stark employee with a grudge and a drone fleet.

The film's real weight is Tony's absence. Peter is sixteen, has inherited a global weapons platform called EDITH, and is being asked by everyone to be the next Iron Man by people who have not asked whether he wants to be.

It closes the Infinity Saga formally - it was marketed as the epilogue - while opening the multiverse as an idea the audience has now heard even though it turns out to be fake.

Its final thirty seconds are the most consequential in Peter Parker's screen life: identity exposed, framed for murder, on live television.

• The illusion sequence in Berlin, which is the most visually inventive thing in any Spider-Man film.
• Beck's briefing to his own crew, which reframes the previous hour as staged.
• Happy and Peter in the jet, and the Ramones.
• The J. Jonah Jameson broadcast, and a beat of silence.

Released  5 November 2021

Director  Chloe Zhao

Written By  Chloe Zhao, Patrick Burleigh, Ryan Firpo and Kaz Firpo

Key Cast  Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Kumail Nanjiani, Brian Tyree Henry, Lauren Ridloff, Barry Keoghan, Ma Dong-seok, Kit Harington

Post-Credits  Eros and Pip arrive; Dane Whitman reaches for the Ebony Blade

Ten immortals were sent to Earth in 5000 BC to protect humanity from Deviants and have been living among us ever since - one as a Bollywood star, one as a schoolteacher, one in a Mumbai mansion. Then the Deviants return, and the Eternals discover what they were actually deployed for.

The reveal is the film's whole argument: they are not protectors, they are agricultural equipment. Every civilisation they nurtured was cultivation for the birth of a Celestial that will destroy the planet on emergence, and the Deviants were the pest control that got out of hand.

It is the most theologically ambitious thing Marvel has released and the most divisive. Chloe Zhao shot it largely on location in natural light with an unusually restrained visual grammar, which is why it does not look like anything else in the franchise.

It also answers a question audiences had been asking for a decade - where were these people during Thanos - and answers it in the least reassuring way available: they were told not to intervene, and they did not.

• The Babylon sequence and the invention of agriculture.
• Phastos in Hiroshima, and what he does afterwards.
• Ikaris and Ajak on the cliff.
• The Emergence, and a Celestial's hand rising out of the Indian Ocean and stopping.

Released  17 December 2021

Director  Jon Watts

Written By  Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers

Key Cast  Tom Holland, Zendaya, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jacob Batalon, Willem Dafoe, Alfred Molina, Jamie Foxx, Benedict Wong, Marisa Tomei, Charlie Cox

Post-Credits  Venom leaves a fragment behind; the Multiverse of Madness trailer

Peter's life collapses under the exposure - he is charged, cleared, and then he and everyone he loves is rejected by MIT because of the association. So he asks a wizard to make the world forget, and then amends the spell six times while it is being cast.

What arrives are five men from other universes who all died fighting a Peter Parker. May's argument - that they should be cured rather than sent home to die - is the film's moral centre, and it is what gets her killed.

It is the first film to make the multiverse physical, and the first to treat legacy casting as story rather than fan service. The three Peters comparing injuries is a joke; the three Peters talking about the people they could not save is not.

It also restores Charlie Cox's Matt Murdock to the screen, which is the moment the Netflix material formally rejoined the main continuity.

• Doctor Octopus on the bridge, and the first arrival.
• The apartment, and the argument about whether to cure or return them.
• May's death, and the line she gets to say first.
• The two arrivals in the loft, and the audience noise that greeted them.
• The final spell, and Peter walking away from the coffee shop.

Released  6 May 2022

Director  Sam Raimi

Written By  Michael Waldron

Key Cast  Benedict Cumberbatch, Elizabeth Olsen, Xochitl Gomez, Benedict Wong, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rachel McAdams, Patrick Stewart

Post-Credits  Clea recruits Strange to fix an incursion; the pizza ball man is released

America Chavez can punch holes between universes and cannot control when. Something is hunting her across realities for that power, and it turns out to be Wanda Maximoff, corrupted by the Darkhold, trying to reach a universe where Billy and Tommy are real.

Raimi directs it as horror, which no MCU film had genuinely attempted. The Illuminati sequence on Earth-838 is a slasher scene with a superhero team as the victims.

Its subject is that being right about your own grief does not make you correct. Wanda's want is completely comprehensible and the film never argues otherwise; it argues that the cost is other people's children.

It also confirms that variants of the Fox X-Men exist in the MCU multiverse - Patrick Stewart's Xavier, in the animated series' hoverchair - which is the first formal bridge between the two franchises.

• The dreamwalking, and what Strange does with a corpse.
• Earth-838's Illuminati, and how quickly it goes wrong.
• The music-note duel, which is the most Raimi thing in any Marvel film.
• Wanda destroying the Darkhold across every universe at once.

Released  November to December 2021, Disney+ - six episodes

Head Writer  Jonathan Igla

Key Cast  Jeremy Renner, Hailee Steinfeld, Vera Farmiga, Fra Fee, Tony Dalton, Alaqua Cox, Florence Pugh, Vincent D'Onofrio

Introduces  Kate Bishop, Maya Lopez and Wilson Fisk's return to the screen

Post-Credits  The full Rogers: The Musical number

Kate Bishop, twenty-two and immortal in her own estimation, buys the Ronin suit at a black-market auction and puts it on, which resurrects the identity Clint used during the Blip to murder his way across four continents. The people Ronin wronged all still exist.

It is a Christmas caper with a hangover underneath it. Clint is deaf, exhausted and grieving Natasha, and the series is largely about him trying to close an account before the holidays.

It brings Wilson Fisk back to screen after Daredevil's cancellation, which was the first firm signal that the Netflix material was returning rather than being abandoned.

It also introduces Maya Lopez, gives Yelena Belova her follow-up from Black Widow's post-credits scene, and puts Kate Bishop in place as a Young Avengers foundation stone.

• The larping subplot, which should not work.
• Clint and Kate on the rooftop, and the arrow trick-shot sequence.
• Yelena and Kate eating macaroni cheese while one of them explains she is there to kill the other's mentor.
• Maya Lopez versus Fisk in the final episode.

Released  March to May 2022, Disney+ - six episodes

Head Writer  Jeremy Slater

Directors  Mohamed Diab, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead

Key Cast  Oscar Isaac, Ethan Hawke, May Calamawy, F. Murray Abraham, Karim El Hakim

Post-Credits  Jake Lockley, a third alter, executing Arthur Harrow

Steven Grant works in a museum gift shop, chains himself to his bed at night and loses days at a time. He shares a body with Marc Spector, a mercenary who died in a desert and was brought back as the avatar of Khonshu, the Egyptian god of the moon.

Arthur Harrow, a former avatar, wants to free the goddess Ammit, who judges people for crimes they have not yet committed. The show is at its best in episode five, which abandons the plot entirely for a psychiatric ward and an afterlife weighing scale.

It proved the MCU could produce something with no connective tissue at all, which after eighteen months of homework-heavy television was a genuine relief.

Oscar Isaac plays both alters distinctly enough that the show can stage conversations between them in reflections, and the third alter arrives only in the final seconds.

• The first transformation, seen in fragments through a bathroom mirror.
• The Duat, and two versions of one man walking through a boat full of their own memories.
• Episode five's reveal about Marc's brother and his mother.
• The post-credits scene, and the limousine.

Released  11 November 2022

Director  Ryan Coogler

Written By  Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole

Key Cast  Letitia Wright, Angela Bassett, Lupita Nyong'o, Danai Gurira, Winston Duke, Tenoch Huerta Mejia, Dominique Thorne, Michaela Coel, Martin Freeman

Mid-Credits  Nakia introduces Shuri to Toussaint - T'Challa's son

Wakanda has lost its king and is being circled by nations that want its vibranium. A detector built by an MIT student finds a deposit on the ocean floor, which brings a second hidden civilisation to the surface - and Namor, who has spent five hundred years keeping Talokan invisible for exactly the reasons Wakanda understands.

The film's central relationship is not hero and villain but two isolationist nations recognising each other, and a grieving sister who cannot forgive quickly enough to prevent a war.

It is a film about grief made by people who were grieving, and it declines to give Shuri a clean recovery. Her ancestral plane visit brings her Killmonger rather than T'Challa, which is the harshest and best decision in it.

Namor is the strongest antagonist Phase Four produced: entirely reasonable, entirely ruthless, and correct that the surface world will come for him eventually.

• The opening, and the funeral - a celebration rather than a dirge.
• Ramonda addressing the UN.
• Namor's account of the conquistadors and his mother's burial.
• Shuri on the ancestral plane, and who is waiting.

Released  January 2024, Disney+ - five episodes, released at once

Head Writers  Marion Dayre, with Amy Rardin and Ken Kristensen

Key Cast  Alaqua Cox, Chaske Spencer, Tantoo Cardinal, Devery Jacobs, Zahn McClarnon, Vincent D'Onofrio, Charlie Cox

Rating  TV-MA - the first Marvel Studios series to carry it

Maya Lopez, having shot Wilson Fisk and left New York, returns to the Choctaw community in Oklahoma she was taken from as a child. Her family do not want her back, the local criminal economy is not interested in her ambitions, and Fisk is not dead.

The series is at its best when it is not about superheroics at all. Its flashback sequences run back through generations of Choctaw women, and the show was produced with Choctaw Nation consultation on language, dress and the roller rink.

It is the first Marvel property led by a deaf Indigenous actor and the first to use Choctaw and American Sign Language as primary rather than decorative.

It also holds the last significant Fisk material before Born Again, and the relationship between him and Maya - a man who took a child in and raised her into a weapon - is the strongest thread in it.

• The Daredevil fight in episode one, which is the character's first appearance since 2018.
• The generational flashbacks, staged as a continuous inheritance rather than exposition.
• The powwow, and what Maya does with what she is given.
• Fisk and Maya's final conversation, which Born Again picks up from.

Released  August to October 2022, Disney+ - nine episodes

Head Writer  Jessica Gao

Director  Kat Coiro, with Anu Valia

Key Cast  Tatiana Maslany, Mark Ruffalo, Tim Roth, Ginger Gonzaga, Benedict Wong, Jameela Jamil, Charlie Cox

Post-Credits  Bruce introduces his son Skaar

Jennifer Walters is a deputy district attorney who gets Bruce Banner's blood in an open wound during a car crash and acquires his abilities without any of his problems - which she finds insulting, since he spent fifteen years in therapy for it and she got there in a weekend.

She is fired for turning green in a courtroom, hired to run a superhuman law division, and spends the series representing Emil Blonsky at a parole hearing, an Asgardian light-elf shoemaker and an influencer who has stolen her blood.

It is the MCU at its most self-aware, and it collects on threads nobody expected: Blonsky from 2008, Wong from Doctor Strange, and Matt Murdock in a yellow suit, playing the character as a functional adult for the first time on screen.

The finale breaks the format entirely - Jennifer walks out of her own show, up through the Disney+ menu, into the writers' room, and argues with an AI called K.E.V.I.N. about the ending. It is the strangest thing Marvel has ever aired.

• The four-minute pilot cold open explaining the origin so the series can get on with it.
• Blonsky's parole hearing and the retreat he runs afterwards.
• Matt Murdock's two episodes, and the walk of shame.
• The K.E.V.I.N. sequence.

Released  June to July 2022, Disney+ - six episodes

Head Writer  Bisha K. Ali

Directors  Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, Meera Menon, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

Key Cast  Iman Vellani, Matt Lintz, Yasmeen Fletcher, Zenobia Shroff, Mohan Kapur, Saagar Shaikh

Post-Credits  Kamala and Carol Danvers swap places

Kamala Khan is sixteen, writes Captain Marvel fan fiction, and is not allowed to go to a convention. She finds a bangle in her grandmother's belongings, puts it on, and starts generating hard light out of her hands in front of a car park full of cosplayers.

The series is a coming-of-age comedy for four episodes and then goes somewhere unexpected: the bangle belonged to her great-grandmother, and the fifth episode relocates entirely to 1947 and the trains leaving for the new border.

Episode five is the strongest single hour of Marvel television after WandaVision. It is about Partition, and about a child separated from her mother on a platform, and it is directed by an Oscar-winning documentarian.

The finale then drops the word the franchise had avoided for a decade. Bruno tells Kamala her genes have a mutation, and the X-Men theme plays over it - the first confirmation that mutants exist on this timeline.

• AvengerCon, and Kamala's costume winning for the wrong reasons.
• The wedding, and the fight that interrupts it.
• The 1947 sequence and the train platform.
• The final scene, and four notes of a theme from a 1992 cartoon.

Released  8 July 2022

Director  Taika Waititi

Written By  Taika Waititi and Jennifer Kaytin Robinson

Key Cast  Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Christian Bale, Tessa Thompson, Russell Crowe, Taika Waititi

Post-Credits  Zeus sends Hercules after Thor; Jane arrives in Valhalla

Gorr the God Butcher watches his daughter die of thirst while praying, meets the god he was praying to, finds him contemptuous, and picks up a sword that kills gods. It is the best opening sequence in the franchise and the film never returns to its register.

Meanwhile Jane Foster, undergoing chemotherapy that is not working, is called by the reforged Mjolnir and becomes the Mighty Thor - a transformation that burns through her remaining strength every time she uses it.

The film's problem is tonal. It contains a story about terminal illness, a story about a bereaved father killing deities, and a large number of jokes, and it does not reconcile them.

What survives is the ending. Jane chooses the hammer knowing it is killing her, and Gorr chooses to wish his daughter back rather than complete his work - two people with nothing left making the same kind of decision.

• The Gorr prologue.
• Omnipotence City, and Russell Crowe's Zeus.
• The Shadow Realm sequence, shot in monochrome.
• Jane's last fight, and the conversation on the rocks afterwards.

Released  June to July 2025, Disney+ - six episodes

Head Writer  Chinaka Hodge

Key Cast  Dominique Thorne, Anthony Ramos, Lyric Ross, Alden Ehrenreich, Regan Aliyah, Sacha Baron Cohen

Banner  Marvel Spotlight

Introduces  Parker Robbins, the Hood - and magic returning to the street level

Riri Williams is nineteen, brilliant, broke and grieving a friend killed in a shooting she survived. To fund the suit she falls in with a crew run by Parker Robbins, whose hooded cloak grants abilities he does not understand and did not pay for in money.

The series is a technology-versus-magic story dressed as a heist, and its central question is what Riri is prepared to trade to build the thing she cannot stop building.

It is the MCU's most direct engagement with the cost of genius - the show is unusually interested in the debt, the funding and the family that pays for it - and one of the few entries where the protagonist's flaw is not a lesson she learns by the finale.

It also brings genuinely infernal magic into the franchise, in a way Doctor Strange's material had kept at cosmic arm's length.

• The unlicensed suit's first flight.
• Riri's AI reconstruction of her dead friend, which is the series' most uncomfortable idea.
• The Hood's cloak and what it demands.
• The final-episode reveal about who has actually been financing all of it.

Released  October 2022, Disney+ - 53 minutes

Director  Michael Giacchino, in his directorial debut

Starring  Gael Garcia Bernal, Laura Donnelly, Harriet Sansom Harris

Format  Black and white, with a brief colour flourish

A cabal of monster hunters gather to compete for leadership of their order after the death of Ulysses Bloodstone. The prize is the Bloodstone; the quarry is a monster released into the grounds. One of the hunters is a monster himself, and another is Man-Thing.

Giacchino shoots it as a 1930s Universal horror pastiche, complete with simulated film grain, cigarette burns and a full orchestral score he also wrote.

Released  November 2022, Disney+ - 42 minutes

Director  James Gunn

Starring  Pom Klementieff, Dave Bautista, Chris Pratt, Kevin Bacon as himself

Reveals  Mantis is Peter Quill's half-sister

Mantis and Drax travel to Earth to abduct Kevin Bacon as a Christmas present for a depressed Peter Quill, having understood from Yondu's old stories that Bacon is a genuine hero. Bacon is not enthusiastic.

It is forty-two minutes of sustained comedy that also drops a substantial character revelation in its final scene almost as an aside.

Released  17 February 2023

Director  Peyton Reed

Written By  Jeff Loveness

Key Cast  Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Jonathan Majors, Michelle Pfeiffer, Michael Douglas, Kathryn Newton, Bill Murray, Corey Stoll

Post-Credits  A Council of Kangs convenes; Loki and Mobius watch Victor Timely on stage

Cassie has built a device to signal into the Quantum Realm without telling anyone what it might reach. It reaches something, and pulls all five of them down into a populated civilisation Janet van Dyne spent thirty years in and has never once mentioned.

Kang the Conqueror has been marooned there with a damaged multiversal engine. Janet helped him repair it, then learned what he had done with the last one, and sabotaged it - which is why he has been waiting.

It was constructed as the launch pad for the saga's overarching antagonist, and the post-credits scene convening a stadium of Kang variants was the clearest statement of intent Marvel had made about its endgame.

The plan did not survive contact with events. Jonathan Majors was dropped by the studio in December 2023, and the Kang storyline was substantially redirected toward Doctor Doom - which is why the film now sits in the timeline as a large piece of setup with a rerouted payoff.

• Janet's thirty-year backstory, told as its own short film in the middle.
• Kang's account of what he does to timelines that resist him.
• MODOK, which the film treats as a joke and which the audience mostly agreed with.
• The Council of Kangs, and the noise a stadium of them makes.

Released  5 May 2023

Director  James Gunn

Written By  James Gunn

Key Cast  Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, Chukwudi Iwuji, Will Poulter

Post-Credits  The new Guardians; and a promise that the Legendary Star-Lord will return

Adam Warlock attacks Knowhere and leaves Rocket dying with a kill-switch in his chest that prevents anyone operating on him. Saving him requires a passcode held by the man who made him, and the film spends its second act inside Rocket's memory of that laboratory.

The High Evolutionary is not building weapons. He is designing a perfect species and discarding the failures, and the flashbacks are among the most upsetting material Marvel has released.

It is the most emotionally serious film in the Multiverse Saga and the only one that ends by dissolving its own team on purpose. Everyone gets what they need and none of them stay.

The Gamora question is handled unsentimentally: this is the 2014 variant, she does not remember any of it, and the film refuses to give Peter the reunion the audience wants.

• The opening, a single unbroken shot through Knowhere set to Radiohead.
• Rocket's memories - Lylla, Teefs and Floor.
• The corridor fight, one take, the full team, to Beastie Boys.
• The last shot, and Peter arriving at a door in Missouri.

Released  June to July 2023, Disney+ - six episodes

Head Writer  Kyle Bradstreet

Key Cast  Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn, Emilia Clarke, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Olivia Colman, Don Cheadle, Martin Freeman, Charlayne Woodard

Payoff From  Captain Marvel (1995) and the Far From Home post-credits scene

Gravik leads a faction of Skrulls who have concluded that thirty years of waiting for Fury to find them a planet was thirty years wasted, and who have been quietly replacing people in governments and militaries. Any person in the series may be somebody else.

It is the MCU's attempt at a le Carre-inflected spy thriller, and the register suits Samuel L. Jackson - this is the most tired and least in control Fury has ever been.

Its strongest idea is the accusation levelled at Fury throughout: he used a refugee population as an intelligence asset for three decades and never once paid the debt. Talos says it to his face.

The execution divided audiences considerably, particularly the escalation of its final episode, and it remains the most contested Marvel Television release.

• Fury and Talos on the train.
• Rhodey's reveal, and its implications for scenes going back years.
• Olivia Colman's Sonya Falsworth, who is the best thing in it.
• G'iah and Gravik's confrontation.

Released  10 November 2023

Director  Nia DaCosta

Written By  Nia DaCosta, Megan McDonnell and Elissa Karasik

Key Cast  Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris, Iman Vellani, Samuel L. Jackson, Zawe Ashton, Park Seo-joon

Post-Credits  Monica wakes in a parallel reality; Beast, played by Kelsey Grammer, is on staff

Dar-Benn, a Kree revolutionary, uses a quantum band to tear jump points open and steal resources from other worlds - including the atmosphere of a planet Carol was responsible for. The bands entangle Carol, Monica and Kamala so that any use of their powers swaps their positions.

The entanglement is a good gimmick and the fight choreography built around it is the film's best asset. At 105 minutes it is the shortest MCU film and moves accordingly.

It confronts the thing Captain Marvel had left alone: Carol destroyed the Supreme Intelligence and left the Kree empire to collapse without staying to help, and the film's antagonist is the consequence.

It also hands Kamala the job of assembling a team. The Young Avengers thread the franchise has been laying since Hawkeye starts here in earnest.

• The three-way swap during the opening skirmish.
• Aladna, a musical planet, played entirely straight.
• The Flerken evacuation of the S.A.B.E.R. station, set to a show tune.
• Kamala knocking on Kate Bishop's door.

Released  October to November 2023, Disney+ - six episodes

Head Writer  Eric Martin

Directors  Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead

Key Cast  Tom Hiddleston, Owen Wilson, Sophia Di Martino, Jonathan Majors, Ke Huy Quan, Wunmi Mosaku, Eugene Cordero

Consequence  Loki becomes the load-bearing structure of the multiverse

Loki is slipping uncontrollably through time while the Temporal Loom - the machine that spins branching timelines into something survivable - overloads, because it was never built for more than one. Every branch created since Sylvie's decision is about to be destroyed along with everything else.

The season is largely a technical problem solved by engineers, with Ke Huy Quan's Ouroboros as its most enjoyable addition, and it ends by concluding that the machine cannot be fixed.

Its conclusion is the most genuinely strange thing the MCU has done. Loki works out that there is no version of the plan where everyone survives except one, walks to the end of time, destroys the Loom by hand and takes its place - holding every branch personally, forever, alone.

The character who began the franchise wanting a throne ends it by becoming one. It is a properly earned ending for a thirteen-year arc and the franchise has, so far, left it alone.

• The time-slipping sequences, staged as physical horror.
• Victor Timely in 1893 Chicago, and a lecture nobody attends.
• The Loom overloading, and the spaghettification.
• The final walk, and the throne of vines at the End of Time.

Released  December 2023 and December 2024, Disney+ - nine episodes each

Head Writer  A.C. Bradley, with Matthew Chauncey on season three

Director  Bryan Andrews

Narrator  Jeffrey Wright as the Watcher

Status  Concluded; season three is the final season

Season two runs a 1988 Gamora, a Hydra Stomper, a Wakandan first contact and an Avengers assembled in 1602. Season three closes the series out with a run that includes a Red Guardian episode, a Storyteller, and a finale that brings the Watcher's own arc to an end.

The anthology format means quality varies episode to episode, but the ceiling is high and several entries do things the live-action films structurally cannot.

It is the connective tissue of the multiverse in practice - the place where variants are established, populated and given enough personality to be recognisable when they appear elsewhere.

Captain Carter graduated from here to a live-action appearance in Multiverse of Madness, which remains the clearest proof that the animated branches feed the films.

• Season two's 1602 episode, which commits fully to the conceit.
• The Kahhori episode, written and produced with Mohawk consultants and performed partly in Kanien'keha.
• Season three's willingness to end the Watcher's story rather than leave it open.
• The recurring joke that every universe finds a different way to make Ultron worse.

Released  26 July 2024

Director  Shawn Levy

Written By  Ryan Reynolds, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Zeb Wells and Shawn Levy

Key Cast  Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, Matthew Macfadyen, Morena Baccarin, Dafne Keen, Wesley Snipes

Rating  R - the first R-rated film released under the Marvel Studios banner

The TVA collects Wade Wilson to explain that his universe is decaying, because a universe collapses when its Anchor Being dies and Earth-10005's died in 2029. The proposed remedy is to find a replacement Wolverine somewhere in the multiverse.

What he brings back is the worst available - a variant who failed his X-Men and has been drinking about it since. Both are pruned into the Void, where the multiverse deposits what it has finished with.

It is the bridge between the Fox continuity and Earth-616, and it does the job without overwriting anything: Logan's death stands, the Fox timeline is canonised as ended, and variants are licensed indefinitely.

It also establishes that TVA operations continue after Loki's ascension, which is a piece of housekeeping the saga needed.

• The opening fight around Logan's exhumed skeleton, choreographed to a boy band.
• The 20th Century Fox fanfare used as a eulogy.
• The Void cameos - Blade, Elektra, Gambit, Laura Kinney, the Human Torch.
• Wolverine in the brown-and-tan suit, twenty-four years late.

Released  September to October 2024, Disney+ - nine episodes

Created By  Jac Schaeffer

Key Cast  Kathryn Hahn, Joe Locke, Aubrey Plaza, Patti LuPone, Sasheer Zamata, Ali Ahn, Debra Jo Rupp

Banner  Marvel Spotlight

Continues  WandaVision, and the Billy Maximoff thread

A teenager breaks the spell holding Agatha, and immediately asks her to walk the Witches' Road - a trial that grants a witch what she most wants, if she survives it. Agatha assembles a coven she has no intention of keeping alive and sets off.

The teenager is Billy Maximoff, one of the sons who stopped existing when the hex came down, now inhabiting the body of a boy who died at the same moment. He is looking for his brother.

It is a series about performance and legacy, and it does the same trick WandaVision did - a genre pastiche that turns out to be a defence mechanism. The Road is not real. What is on it is.

Kathryn Hahn carries it, and the show gives Agatha a backstory that reframes her entire WandaVision performance retroactively.

• The opening episodes as a Mare of Easttown pastiche.
• The Ballad of the Witches' Road, which is a genuine earworm and also load-bearing plot.
• Rio Vidal's identity, and what she has been waiting for.
• The final episode, and what Agatha becomes.

Released  March to April 2025, Disney+ - nine episodes

Showrunner  Dario Scardapane

Key Cast  Charlie Cox, Vincent D'Onofrio, Margarita Levieva, Deborah Ann Woll, Elden Henson, Wilson Bethel, Jon Bernthal, Ayelet Zurer

Rating  TV-MA

Production Note  Substantially retooled mid-production; Scardapane and the Netflix creative approach were brought in

Foggy Nelson is killed in the first episode by Bullseye, and Matt and Karen scatter. A year on, Matt is running a new firm and refusing to be Daredevil; Fisk is campaigning on a law-and-order platform and winning.

The two of them meet in a diner and agree, more or less sincerely, that they have both stopped. Neither has. The series is largely a study of two men performing restraint at each other while the city works out which one is lying.

It is the point at which the Netflix continuity formally resumes rather than being referenced. The tone, the cast and the violence level are carried over intact, and the show does not pretend the intervening years did not happen.

It is also, structurally, a City Hall political thriller. Fisk as an elected official with an anti-vigilante task force is a far better use of the character than another crime empire would have been. Individual episodes are worth taking apart on their own terms - as this episode-by-episode look at Born Again episode five gets into.

• Foggy's death, in the first fifteen minutes.
• The diner conversation between Matt and Fisk.
• Fisk's inauguration, and the machinery that comes with it.
• Matt putting the suit back on, and the noise the season had been building toward.

Released  14 February 2025

Director  Julius Onah

Written By  Rob Edwards, Malcolm Spellman, Dalan Musson, Julius Onah and Peter Glanz

Key Cast  Anthony Mackie, Harrison Ford, Danny Ramirez, Tim Blake Nelson, Carl Lumbly, Shira Haas, Giancarlo Esposito

Payoff From  The Incredible Hulk (2008) and Eternals (2021), seventeen and four years later

Thaddeus Ross has been elected on a promise to do better and is negotiating an international treaty over the body of the Celestial in the Indian Ocean, which has turned out to contain adamantium. Then somebody starts triggering people into assassination attempts at close range.

Behind it is Samuel Sterns, the scientist who took a drop of Banner's blood to the forehead in 2008 and has spent seventeen years in a cell being used for his intelligence and denied release.

It is a political thriller in the Winter Soldier mould with a fraction of that film's confidence, but its through-line is sound: Sam has no serum, no shield-throwing invulnerability, and has to be Captain America on argument alone.

Isaiah Bradley's continued presence is the film's conscience, and the treatment of him by the state is its actual subject.

• The opening operation, and Sam and Joaquin Torres working as a unit.
• Isaiah Bradley's arrest, and what it does to Sam.
• Sterns' explanation of how long he has been calculating.
• The Red Hulk, and a fight in a garden that is really an argument between two men who have both been ruined by service.

Released  2 May 2025

Director  Jake Schreier

Written By  Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo

Key Cast  Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan, Wyatt Russell, David Harbour, Hannah John-Kamen, Olga Kurylenko, Lewis Pullman, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Geraldine Viswanathan

Post-Credits  Fourteen months later; a ship enters the atmosphere bearing a family from elsewhere

Yelena Belova is doing contract work she does not believe in and cannot stop doing. Valentina, facing impeachment, sends five of her assets into the same sealed facility expecting them to eliminate each other. They do not, mostly because they are too tired.

What they find is Bob - a test subject with no memory and the largest power set in the franchise, whose depression manifests as an entity called the Void that turns people into shadows on the pavement.

It is the first Marvel film to make its climax a mental health intervention. The Void cannot be punched, and the resolution is six people walking into a man's worst memory and standing next to him in it.

The asterisk in the title is the joke and the point: Valentina rebrands the team as the New Avengers in a press conference at the end, without asking any of them, because she needs the word.

• The opening, Yelena falling off a building because she cannot think of a reason not to.
• The vault, and five people realising simultaneously what they were sent there for.
• The Void arriving in Manhattan and the city going quiet.
• The memory sequence, and the hand on the shoulder.

Released  25 July 2025

Director  Matt Shakman

Written By  Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan and Ian Springer

Key Cast  Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Julia Garner, Ralph Ineson, Paul Walter Hauser, Natasha Lyonne

Timeline Status  Separate universe; connects via the Thunderbolts* post-credits scene

Four astronauts came back from a cosmic-ray exposure changed, and have spent four years being famous about it. Then a herald arrives on a silver board to announce that their planet has been marked for consumption, and the family have roughly a fortnight.

Sue Storm is pregnant. Galactus offers a trade: the child, in exchange for the world. The film is about four people refusing a deal that would objectively save billions, and a planet that finds out they refused it.

Its most important decision is the setting. By placing the Fantastic Four in their own universe with their own history, the film avoids fifteen years of continuity and gets to be a 1960s science-adventure picture about a family.

Galactus is played straight - vast, unhurried and entirely without malice - which is the version the character has always needed and never had on screen.

• The opening, which covers the origin in a television retrospective and moves on.
• Shalla-Bal's arrival, and a silver figure standing in Times Square.
• Galactus in orbit, at scale.
• Franklin Richards, and what he is.

Released  27 January 2026, Disney+ - eight episodes, released at once

Created By  Destin Daniel Cretton and Andrew Guest

Showrunner  Andrew Guest

Key Cast  Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Ben Kingsley, Arian Moayed, Zlatko Buric, Ed Harris, Olivia Thirlby, Demetrius Grosse

Banner  Marvel Spotlight

Simon Williams is a struggling actor who over-prepares to the point of self-sabotage, and who has powers he cannot afford to be caught having. A chance meeting at a revival screening puts him next to Trevor Slattery, the actor who played the Mandarin and has spent thirteen years living down to it.

Both audition for a remake of an eighties superhero film called Wonder Man, directed by an eccentric auteur. The Department of Damage Control has meanwhile blackmailed Trevor into informing on Simon.

It is the most unusual thing Marvel has produced. There is barely any action, no villain in the conventional sense, and the subject is acting as a profession - preparation, rejection, the indignity of the audition room.

Ben Kingsley has now played Trevor Slattery across thirteen years and four projects, which makes a running joke from Iron Man 3 into one of the longest-running characters in the franchise.

• The cold open, and a walk-on part lost to over-preparation.
• The audition sequences, played straight enough to be genuinely tense.
• Trevor's informing, and what it costs a friendship built entirely on shared craft.
• A finale that declines to become an effects sequence.

Released  March to May 2026, Disney+ - eight episodes

Showrunner  Dario Scardapane

Key Cast  Charlie Cox, Vincent D'Onofrio, Margarita Levieva, Deborah Ann Woll, Wilson Bethel, Ayelet Zurer

Finale  "The Southern Cross", 5 May 2026

Post-Credits  None - the Punisher special followed a week later instead

Fisk holds City Hall and has turned the machinery of local government against masked vigilantes, which means Matt Murdock is now a criminal by ordinance rather than by convention. The season is built around a city coming apart under a mayor who is generating the disorder he campaigned to fix.

Bullseye, Jack Duquesne and BB Urich all feature. Frank Castle does not, and the absence is deliberate - the season leaves a Punisher-shaped hole that a separate 46-minute special fills a week after the finale.

It is the fullest realisation of what the Netflix material always wanted to be: a New York crime story where the costume is incidental and the institution is the antagonist.

It also, structurally, positions Matt and Fisk as a fixed opposition the franchise can return to indefinitely, in the way the films have never quite managed with any pairing.

• The Hell's Kitchen riots, which run across multiple episodes rather than as a set piece.
• Fisk's use of the mayoralty, which is more frightening than any of his criminal work.
• Bullseye's return.
• The finale, "The Southern Cross", which ends the season without a post-credits scene.

Released  12 May 2026, Disney+ - 46 minutes

Starring  Jon Bernthal, with Deborah Ann Woll, Jason R. Moore and Judith Light

Format  Marvel Television Special Presentation

Post-Credits  None

A very bad day in the life of Frank Castle, in which the psychological and physical damage he has accumulated since 2016 comes back on him at once. The riots visible in Born Again season two are running in the background.

It answers the question the season deliberately left open - where Frank was - and it exists specifically to deliver him, in full Punisher regalia, to a cinema release ten weeks later.

Released  31 July 2026

Director  Destin Daniel Cretton

Written By  Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers

Key Cast  Tom Holland, Zendaya, Sadie Sink, Jacob Batalon, Jon Bernthal, Mark Ruffalo, Michael Mando, Tramell Tillman, Marvin Jones III, Liza Colon-Zayas, Marisa Tomei

Studio  Columbia Pictures and Marvel Studios; distributed by Sony

Peter is a full-time vigilante with no support structure, watching his closest friends live lives he is no longer in. The isolation is doing something to him he cannot control, and the film's antagonist is a threat nobody can see - a telepathic presence that moves between host bodies, so that anyone in the city might be it.

Frank Castle is in it. Bruce Banner is in it. The Hand are in it. It is the most crowded Spider-Man film since No Way Home and the reviews have been fairly consistent that it is overstuffed and works anyway.

It is the last film released before Avengers: Doomsday, and it resets Peter Parker as a street-level hero operating alone, which is where the character has always been strongest.

It also brings Jean Grey into the MCU, played by Sadie Sink - the same actor announced at D23 2026 as Jean Grey in the 2028 X-Men reboot, which makes this the first crossing point between the two.

• The swinging sequences, which the production achieved substantially practically and which reviewers singled out.
• Spider-Man attempting to contain a rampaging Hulk.
• The Hand sequence, and Cretton's fight choreography.
• The final act, and a city recognising a hero it does not remember.

Release Date  18 December 2026, moved from May 2026

Directors  Anthony and Joe Russo

Principal Writers  Stephen McFeely, with Michael Waldron involved in the screenplay

Antagonist  Victor von Doom, played by Robert Downey Jr

Three Worlds  Earth-616, the Fantastic Four's Earth-828 and the returning X-Men reality

Followed By  Avengers: Secret Wars, 17 December 2027

Doctor Doom's history supplies the science, sorcery and appetite for godhood that the MCU must now translate.

The film was announced as Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, with Kang positioned across Loki and Quantumania as the Multiverse Saga's culminating antagonist. Jonathan Majors left the studio in December 2023. Marvel rebuilt the film around Doctor Doom and revealed Robert Downey Jr in the role at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2024, six years after Tony Stark's death within the story.

Marvel continues to identify Downey's character as Victor von Doom. The studio has never confirmed that he is a Tony Stark variant. The shared face is therefore an intentional mystery rather than an answer, and Doom's comic history is the firmer guide to the character until the film resolves it.

• Chris Evans returns as Steve Rogers, continuing the story left open when Steve went back to live with Peggy Carter.
• Thor, Sam Wilson's Avengers, the New Avengers, Wakanda, the Fantastic Four and legacy X-Men are pulled into the same crisis.
• Doctor Doom is the force driving the collision, and Downey performs him with a distinct accent rather than Tony Stark's voice.
• The July trailer and August D23 footage present the film as a conflict among three universes rather than a conventional invasion of one Earth.

The announced roster includes Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Hayley Atwell, Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan, Letitia Wright, Paul Rudd, Kathryn Newton, Simu Liu, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Wyatt Russell, Lewis Pullman, Hannah John-Kamen, Danny Ramirez, Winston Duke, Tenoch Huerta Mejía, Mabel Cadena, Alex Livinalli and India Rose Hemsworth. The Fantastic Four arrive through Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bachrach. The returning mutant contingent includes Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, James Marsden, Kelsey Grammer, Rebecca Romijn and Alan Cumming, with Channing Tatum returning as Gambit.

That cast turns the First Steps bridge, the New Avengers reveal at the end of Thunderbolts*, the multiversal X-Men appearances and the TVA storyline into parts of one event.

Principal photography began in April 2025 at Pinewood Studios and wrapped in September, with location work in England and Bahrain and additional photography in 2026. Alan Silvestri returns to score both Doomsday and Secret Wars. Disney's delay from May to December 2026 created the longest MCU theatrical gap since the pandemic between The Fantastic Four: First Steps and Spider-Man: Brand New Day, part of the studio's deliberate slowdown after years of rapid expansion.

Release Date  17 December 2027

Directors  Anthony and Joe Russo

Official Cast Listing  Robert Downey Jr

Additional Returns Announced  Sadie Sink, Letitia Wright, Simu Liu and Paul Bettany

Saga Function  Final film of the Multiverse Saga

The 2015 Secret Wars gives the MCU its clearest possible model: a dead Multiverse rebuilt as Doom's kingdom.

The film takes its name from two Marvel events. Jim Shooter and Mike Zeck's 1984 Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars brings heroes and villains to a patchwork planet created by the Beyonder, where Doom steals the being's power. Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribić's 2015 Secret Wars begins after incursions destroy the Multiverse. Doom, Doctor Strange and Molecule Man salvage fragments of dying realities into Battleworld, with Victor ruling the remains of creation as God Emperor.

The shared title confirms source material, not a scene-by-scene adaptation. The MCU has already established incursions in Multiverse of Madness, a threatened parallel reality in The Marvels, the Void and TVA, the Fantastic Four on Earth-828, and Doom as the antagonist of the preceding film. Those pieces make the 2015 structure especially relevant without proving exactly how Marvel will assemble them.

• Whether the colliding universes survive separately, merge or become a Battleworld.
• Whether Doom ends Doomsday as conqueror, saviour, god or some combination of all three.
• How Loki's living multiverse, the TVA and the incursion problem can coexist.
• Which legacy characters continue after the Multiverse Saga closes.
• How the new X-Men era emerges from the wreckage without erasing the mutant history already shown on screen.

VisionQuest  14 October 2026 on Disney+, Paul Bettany returning

X-Men  5 May 2028, directed by Jake Schreier

X-Men Cast  Sadie Sink as Jean Grey, Kit Connor as Cyclops, Christopher Abbott as Professor X, Samara Weaving as Emma Frost, Inde Navarrette as Rogue, Maya Boyd as Storm, Adam Driver as Mister Sinister

Also Held  Untitled Marvel dates in February, May and November 2028

VisionQuest completes the television story begun by WandaVision and continued through Agatha All Along. Marvel unveiled its trailer at D23 2026 and dated the series for 14 October, placing it before Doomsday and Secret Wars in release order even though its exact story year remains to be confirmed.

The X-Men film follows Secret Wars, which strongly suggests that whatever the Avengers finale does to the multiverse creates the conditions for mutants to become residents of the franchise rather than visitors from Fox continuity. Sadie Sink's Jean Grey already entered the main MCU through Spider-Man: Brand New Day, so the transition is being seeded before the reboot.

Emma Frost and Mister Sinister point toward psychic manipulation and genetic engineering. Sinister is Nathaniel Essex, a scientist obsessed with mutant bloodlines, while Jean, Cyclops, Xavier, Storm and Rogue establish a recognisable heroic core. The line-up does not simply recreate the first Fox film, and Kevin Feige has said the announced cast is incomplete.

• VisionQuest, Paul Bettany's return and its October 2026 premiere.
• A dated X-Men film directed by Jake Schreier.
• The seven announced X-Men performers, unveiled at D23 in August 2026.
• Three further Marvel Studios theatrical dates held for 2028.

1. The minimum for Doomsday. Loki seasons one and two, No Way Home, Multiverse of Madness, Thunderbolts* and The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Six entries, and you will follow December.
2. The films only. Fourteen features in the order above. Coherent, but you will lose Wanda’s entire arc, the whole street-level continuity and the cause of the multiverse.
3. The street-level route. The Defenders Saga section above, then Hawkeye, Echo, Born Again seasons one and two, and The Punisher: One Last Kill. A complete, self-contained New York crime saga running from 2015 to 2026.
4. The complete route. Everything in this article, in order, including the animation. Around 120 hours. The main reward is that the connective tissue actually connects; Trevor Slattery from 2013 to 2026, Blonsky from 2008 to 2022, Sterns from 2008 to 2025.