Watch paths

This is not the best way to watch it. It is the shortest way that still works, for somebody with limited evenings who wants the whole arc rather than a summary of it.

Everything cut from it is genuinely good and genuinely optional. What is kept is what the ending depends on: the man who starts it, the team forming, the film that breaks the world’s trust in institutions, the half of the galaxy that turns out to matter, the argument that splits the team, and the two films that collect all of it.

There are three Peter Parkers and they were made by two studios across three separate continuities that had nothing to do with each other. Then one film put all three in a room, and everything the previous eighteen years had built suddenly counted.

This route watches them in the order that pays that off. The Raimi trilogy first, because it is the oldest and the most complete. Then the two Webb films, which are the ones most people skipped and which the later crossover treats as unfinished business. Then the connected run, where the third Peter arrives inside somebody else’s film and has to earn his own.

Show detailsWhy the Avengers films are in here

Two are, and only two. Captain America: Civil War is where this Peter is recruited, and Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame are where the thing that shapes his last three films happens to him.

Everything else from the connected run is left out on purpose. This is a route through one character, not through a saga.

Before 2019 this story had one timeline and no interest in others. Six years later it has a bureaucracy for policing them, three Spider-Men in one room, and a Fantastic Four on a different Earth. This route is how that happened, with nothing in it that does not move the idea forward.

It starts at the end of the previous saga, because the multiverse is a consequence of what is done there. Then a grieving woman, an arrested god, a spell that goes wrong, and a book that should not be read.

Show detailsWhy WandaVision is second

It is the entry people skip, and it is load-bearing. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness assumes all of it, emotionally rather than factually, and plays as a sudden turn without it.

To be plain about what this is: Avengers: Doomsday is not out. Nobody outside the production knows which of these it will actually need, and this catalogue does not pretend otherwise.

What this route is instead is the load-bearing spine of the saga the film closes: the entries where the multiverse is established, where the rules for it are set, where somebody crosses between universes, and where the last of the separated properties come home. If the film builds on anything, it builds on these.

Show detailsWhat is deliberately not here

The rest of Phase Four and Five. Some of it is very good and none of it has been shown to matter to this particular ending, so putting it in a route called “before the next Avengers film” would be a guess wearing a recommendation’s clothes.

When the film is out, this route gets rewritten from what it actually used, and the difference between the two versions will be worth reading.

No spaceships. No gods. Everything here happens inside a few square miles of New York, to people who get tired, and the through-line is not a threat to the planet but a question about what a city owes the people who live in it.

It is a long watch and it is the most consistent body of work in this catalogue. The order below interleaves the seasons the way they were released, because they were written to be watched that way and because the crossover in the middle assumes the four before it.

Show detailsWhether it counts

For years nobody would say whether these belonged to the same story as the films. In January 2024 they were added to the official timeline, and the revival brought back the same two lead performances.

Each entry’s own page has the specific answer for that show, because it differs.

Most viewers meet Wakanda as a rumour in somebody else’s film and then get the whole argument at once. This route does it the other way: it starts inside, centuries back, with the people sent out to bring stolen vibranium home, and only then arrives at the week the king dies.

Six entries, and the shortest complete arc in the catalogue that is genuinely about a place rather than a person.

The Guardians films are the most self-contained sequence in the connected run and the one with the clearest single arc: a group of people with nothing become a family, badly, over nine years.

This route keeps that arc intact. The two Avengers films are here because the team is in them and because what happens to two of its members there is the whole engine of the third film. The shorts and the Christmas special are here because they are where the family actually gets built, and because they are five and forty minutes rather than two hours.

This series was not planned. It was made across two decades, in two casts, with a time travel film in the middle that rewrites part of it, and watching it in release order means watching the same characters get younger and then older again.

The order here goes by the story instead: the prequel run first, in the decades it is set in, then the original trilogy, then the two Wolverine films that close his arc, then Deadpool, who is commenting on all of it. The New Mutants is last because it is the last thing made and it needs nothing.

Show detailsIt still will not fit perfectly

No order fixes this series. X-Men: Days of Future Past explicitly undoes part of the original trilogy, so watching that trilogy after it means watching events the later film has cancelled.

That is not a flaw in the route. It is the series, and there is no arrangement that hides it.

If you never watch anything else here, watch these two. The first is a self-contained film about an arms manufacturer who changes his mind, made before anybody knew whether this would work. The second is the one where the idea pays off, and it is still the clearest demonstration of what the whole thing was for.

Nothing in between is required to understand the second. That gap is a real gap and it is worth the shortcut.