Organisations

A team assembled by one man out of people who were never going to agree, which spends most of its existence arguing about whether it should exist.

Nick Fury created the Avengers Initiative in 1995 after meeting somebody who could fly through a spaceship, and spent seventeen years quietly building a list before he had a reason to use it. The team is a United States organisation with no charter, no oversight and no legal standing, which is the argument that eventually splits it.

What it actually does is get assembled and disassembled. It forms in 2012 for a single afternoon, reforms with a different roster, breaks over the Sokovia Accords, exists as two illegal halves for two years, comes back for one day, and is formally restarted years later under somebody else’s leadership.

The roster below is who this catalogue has entries for, not everybody who has ever been on it.

The agency that watches for the threats no ordinary government is equipped to see, and that turned out to have been hollow for seventy years.

For the first four years of this story S.H.I.E.L.D. is the infrastructure. It has the aircraft, the files, the budget and the confidence to walk into anybody’s laboratory, and every character here is either working for it, being watched by it, or being recruited by it.

Then Captain America: The Winter Soldier takes it apart, and not by defeating it. It reveals that Hydra never went away after the war and simply grew inside the organisation built to prevent exactly that, which means every good thing the agency did was also cover.

It has never really come back. What replaces it is a series of smaller, stranger bodies, and a director who fakes his own death and keeps working.

A terrorist organisation that began inside the Nazi war machine and survived by growing inside the agency built to destroy it.

Hydra starts as the science division of the Third Reich, led by a man who took an early and imperfect version of the super soldier serum. The war ends, the organisation does not, and the arrangement that lets it continue is that the people hunting Nazi scientists were also recruiting them.

The two people in this catalogue attached to it were not recruits in any ordinary sense. One was captured, wiped and used as a weapon for seventy years. The other volunteered, along with her brother, because they wanted something badly enough to survive an experiment.

Its motto, cut off one head and two more take its place, describes both its structure and the reason it cannot be beaten by winning a fight.

Five criminals who met in a prison and stayed together, which is the only origin story in this catalogue that nobody planned.

They are assembled by circumstance rather than by anybody’s initiative: a thief, an assassin, a bounty hunter, his tree, and a man whose family was murdered. Every one of them is trying to leave for the first half of the film they meet in.

What distinguishes them from every other team here is that the group is the point. The Avengers exist to answer threats. The Guardians exist because none of them has anywhere else, and the plots are mostly a pretext for putting that under pressure.

Thor is on the roster below because he joins them for a while, which is a sentence that would have made no sense in 2014.

A criminal organisation founded a thousand years ago by an immortal warlord, which spent three films being somebody else's cover story.

The Ten Rings are in the very first film. The people who take Tony Stark hostage in Afghanistan work for them, and their name is said out loud. Then they appear again, and again, and in Iron Man 3 it turns out somebody has been borrowing the organisation’s reputation to run a completely different scheme.

Thirteen years after their first appearance, a film finally explains what they actually are: a thousand-year-old organisation founded by Xu Wenwu, named after the mystical rings that made him immortal.

It is the longest setup in this catalogue and almost certainly not one that anybody planned in 2008.

A bureaucracy that exists outside time and deletes any version of history that does not match the one it protects.

The TVA monitors the timeline, identifies anything that has diverged from the approved version, and prunes it, which is a clerical word for an act of erasure on a scale nothing else in this catalogue attempts.

What makes it work as an idea is the tone. It is not a fortress. It is an office, with forms, queues, an orientation video and staff who have been doing this so long that nobody remembers why. The most frightening organisation in this material has a reception desk.

It is also the mechanism by which the multiverse arrives. Everything from Phase Four onward passes through what happens to this agency.

Wakanda's royal guard, sworn to the throne rather than to whoever is sitting on it, and the best soldiers in this catalogue without an enhancement between them.

They are the special forces of a country that has spent centuries pretending to have none, and they are recruited from every tribe, which is part of how the throne holds a federation together.

The interesting thing about them is constitutional. Their oath is to the crown, and the films put that under the worst possible pressure: when the throne is won legitimately by a man they know is wrong, the oath does not have an exception. What the general does about that is the most difficult decision anybody makes in Black Panther.

A programme that took girls, trained them as assassins under the cover of a ballet academy, and sterilised them on graduation.

It is described rather than shown for most of a decade. Natasha Romanoff refers to a ledger written in red, and to a graduation ceremony, long before any film puts the place on screen.

When one finally does, the detail that lands is not the training. It is the administration: false families placed in suburban America for years, chemical control that removes the possibility of refusing, and a man running it who has never once been in danger.

Two people in this catalogue came out of it. One escaped and spent her life paying for what she did inside. The other went back for everybody still there.

An order that has been defending the planet from things nobody else can see, out of three buildings, without telling anyone.

They are a discipline rather than an agency: a hierarchy with its own libraries, its own three-century arguments about what is permitted, and a standing responsibility that predates every other organisation here by a long way. Three Sanctums, in New York, London and Hong Kong, hold a barrier that nothing in the films had thought to ask about.

Their weakness is the one the story keeps using. The order is small, its knowledge is written down in a finite number of books, and a sufficiently motivated reader can get most of the way to catastrophe in an afternoon.

An arms manufacturer inherited by a twenty-one-year-old, run brilliantly for two decades, and then shut down in the middle of a press conference.

Howard Stark built it and shaped a century with it. His son inherited it at twenty-one and ran it the way a prodigy runs anything handed to him: extremely well, and without ever asking whether it should exist.

The decision that starts this entire story is a business decision. Tony Stark cancels the weapons division, live, without telling the board, and the film that follows is about the consequences of a company changing what it makes.

It is the only organisation in this catalogue whose most important act was to stop doing the thing it was for.

Four people from the same city who spent their own series avoiding each other, put in one building for eight episodes.

It is not an organisation so much as an occasion. A blind lawyer, a private investigator, a bulletproof man and a billionaire who says he is a living weapon all arrive at the same conspiracy from four directions, and the miniseries is mostly about how badly they get on.

The name is used once, as a joke, by somebody who is not in it.

It is also the closest the Marvel Television era came to its own crossover, and watching it requires all four of the series before it, which is a demand the films rarely make.

A school for people who were born different, run by a man who believes they can be tolerated, in a world that keeps proving him optimistic.

They existed on screen before any of this. The first X-Men film arrived in 2000, eight years before Iron Man, and established most of what a modern comic book film looks like while doing it.

The team is a school first. Charles Xavier takes in children whose abilities have arrived without warning, teaches them to control what they can do, and argues in public for a coexistence that his oldest friend has concluded is impossible. Every film in the series is that argument with different people standing in for each side.

They belong to a different universe from the rest of this catalogue, made by a different studio under a separate licence, which is a production fact that shaped twenty years of both.

An ancient order of assassins who cannot be killed permanently, which makes them the one enemy in New York that patience does not solve.

They run through the whole of the Netflix run and they are the reason those four series are one story. Daredevil meets them in his second season, Iron Fist was raised to fight them, Colleen Wing was raised inside them, and The Defenders is about all four of the leads arriving at the same building for different reasons.

The interesting thing about them as an antagonist is structural rather than mystical. They are an organisation with money, lawyers, a construction project and a board of directors, and the fighting is a small part of what they do. A vigilante can punch a man in an alley. He cannot punch a corporation, and the Hand is the point at which these series admit that.

Show detailsFive leaders, and the resurrection

The Hand is led by five, and what they want under New York is a substance that extends their lives, which is why killing one of them tends not to be the end of the conversation. Elektra is taken by them and made into the weapon they call the Black Sky.

Thor's oldest friends, three soldiers of Asgard who follow him into every bad idea he has, and who are gone before the good films start.

Fandral the Dashing, Hogun the Grim and Volstagg are Thor’s companions from before the first film. Fandral is a dashing warrior of Asgard, played first by Joshua Dallas and then by Zachary Levi. Hogun, played by Tadanobu Asano, is a grim Vanir warrior from Vanaheim. Volstagg, played by Ray Stevenson, is an Asgardian who loves to eat. All three appear in Thor, Thor: The Dark World and Thor: Ragnarok.

They exist to make Asgard feel like a place somebody grew up in rather than a set, and they do that well in the first film. The trouble is that the series never found anything else for them to do.

Minor spoiler

Hela kills them in 2017, within minutes of arriving. Ragnarok clears the board of everything the first two films built so that it can be a different kind of film, and this is the clearest example of the cost of that decision.

Thanos's adopted children, sent ahead of him to collect the things he wants, in four directions at once.

Ebony Maw, Corvus Glaive, Proxima Midnight and Cull Obsidian are adopted children of Thanos who join his search for the six Infinity Stones. They begin by attacking the Statesman, the ship carrying Thor and the surviving Asgardians, to take the Space Stone. Glaive and Midnight are sent after the Mind Stone and ambush Vision; Maw and Obsidian go to New York for the Time Stone.

They are the reason Infinity War can be in four places at once. Thanos does not need to be in a scene for his pressure to be in it, and that is what the Black Order is for.

Show detailsWhere they are, and are not

Wikipedia records one project each for the four of them as of 2026: Avengers: Infinity War. The versions in Avengers: Endgame are past versions brought forward from 2014 by Thanos, which is why they are listed there as alternate rather than as a return. Gamora and Nebula are also Thanos’s adopted children, and this catalogue keeps them with the Guardians, where they belong.

The rulers of a hidden city on the Moon, where a ritual decides at adolescence whether you get a life or a shift in the mines.

The royal family of Attilan is the centre of Inhumans, and the premise is worth stating plainly because the series does not: every Inhuman goes through Terrigenesis as a teenager, and what comes out of it decides their place for life. Those who come out with nothing are sent to work underground.

Maximus, the king’s brother, came out of it with nothing. He is the only person in the series who says the arrangement out loud, and because he is the villain the series never has to answer him.

Show detailsWhy this entry is short

Inhumans ran for eight episodes in 2017 and is the least defended thing in this catalogue. The royal family is recorded here because it is real and because the series connects to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., not because there is much to recommend.

Ten immortals sent to Earth seven thousand years ago with one instruction and a rule against ever using their power on people.

Sersi can transform matter, Ikaris flies and projects cosmic energy, Kingo fires energy projectiles and becomes a Bollywood star, Sprite makes illusions and is stuck as a child, Phastos invents, Makkari runs, Druig controls minds, Gilgamesh is the strongest of them, Ajak leads, and Thena fights. They have been here since before recorded history and have not intervened in any of it.

That premise is the film’s whole argument and the reason it divides people. If they were here the entire time, then everything in every other entry in this catalogue happened while they watched, and the film has to justify that. Some viewers find the answer profound and some find it a retcon that costs more than it pays for. This catalogue records both readings and does not settle it.

Show detailsFirsts

Makkari is the first deaf superhero in these films, played by Lauren Ridloff, and Phastos, played by Brian Tyree Henry, is the first depicted as gay. Kit Harington plays Dane Whitman, a human history professor at the Natural History Museum in London who is seeing Sersi, and who is handed a cursed sword in the last scene.

Six teenagers who find out what their parents actually do at those charity meetings, and leave.

Alex Wilder is the intelligent one who wants his childhood friends back together and ends up leading. Nico Minoru is a Wiccan who keeps everyone at a distance. Karolina Dean is a human and alien hybrid raised inside a religion. Gertrude Yorkes is an activist with a telepathic link to a genetically engineered dinosaur. Chase Stein is written off as a jock and is a brilliant engineer. Molly Hayes Hernandez is the youngest and the strongest.

The series ran three seasons and thirty-three episodes on Hulu. Its idea is simple and good: the villains are the parents, they meet as an organisation called Pride, and the children have to decide what they owe people who love them and are doing something monstrous.

Show detailsWhere it sits

Runaways is part of the Marvel Television tier, which the films never acknowledge. It crosses over with Cloak & Dagger and with nothing else.

Two teenagers in New Orleans whose powers came from the same night, which is also the night that ruined both their families.

Tandy Bowen is a street thief who can emit light. Tyrone Johnson can engulf people in darkness and move through it. They are connected by a shared childhood tragedy, and the series is careful that the connection is the wound rather than the gift.

Twenty episodes across two seasons on Freeform, set in New Orleans, and unlike almost everything else in this catalogue it is a story about a city rather than about a threat. Brigid O’Reilly, a detective who believes nobody is above the law, is the third point of it.

Show detailsWhere it sits

Part of the Marvel Television tier. It crosses over with Runaways and is otherwise self-contained, which makes it one of the easier things here to watch without preparation.

Five young mutants held in a facility that says it is helping them, in the only horror film the X-Men series ever made.

Rahne Sinclair turns into a wolf and cannot square it with her faith. Illyana Rasputina has sorcery, a Soulsword and teleportation discs. Sam Guthrie can propel himself into the air and is invulnerable while he does it. Dani Moonstar creates illusions from other people’s fears and desires. Roberto da Costa manipulates solar energy. Dr Cecilia Reyes runs the facility and can generate protective fields.

The film was shot in 2017 and released in August 2020 after repeated delays and a studio changing hands, and it is the thirteenth and final entry in the Fox X-Men series. It is the end of that continuity, and almost nobody saw it.

Show detailsA horror film, in name at least

Josh Boone directed and co-wrote it as a superhero horror film. What reached cinemas is a much milder thing than the version that was shot, which is the single most common thing said about it.

The first team, assembled by the CIA out of teenagers in 1962, and split down the middle by the end of the same summer.

Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr recruit them together: Raven, Hank McCoy, Alex Summers out of a military prison, Sean Cassidy, Armando Munoz and Angel Salvadore. They train in a garden, they name themselves, and they stop the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Then the film does the thing the whole series had been avoiding. The people they saved fire on them, and the group divides on the spot into those who think that changes everything and those who think it changes nothing. Nothing in the later films is as clear about what the disagreement actually is.

Minor spoiler

Darwin is killed during the recruitment. Angel leaves for the Hellfire Club before the mission. Raven and Erik walk away at the end of it. Of the eight people in this entry, three are still standing on Xavier’s side when the credits roll, and the school opens anyway.

The last mutants alive, in a future with nothing left to defend, fighting a delaying action so that somebody can undo all of it.

Blink, Warpath, Bishop, Sunspot, Colossus, Kitty Pryde, Storm, Wolverine and, finally in the same room, Xavier and Magneto. They are not an army. They are what is left after the Sentinels have finished, and every scene they are in is an evacuation.

They fight better than any team in the Fox films, because they have to: Kitty sends Bishop back a few days at a time to warn them, Blink puts everyone exactly where they need to be, and each of them has done this hundreds of times. The film opens with them losing anyway.

Show detailsWhat they are actually doing

The fighting is a rearguard. The plan is Kitty holding Wolverine’s mind fifty years in the past for as long as the others can keep the door shut, and every person on this list is spending their life buying her minutes.