Phases

Nobody knew this would work. Marvel Studios was a new production company financing its own films against its characters, having sold the rights to most of the ones anybody had heard of, and the plan was to introduce a handful of second-tier heroes separately and then put them in a room together. There was no precedent for the last step.

So the first five films are built to survive on their own, and they do. Iron Man is a film about an arms manufacturer. The Incredible Hulk is a chase. Thor is a fish out of water comedy. Captain America: The First Avenger is a war film. Each one ends with a scene after the credits that would mean nothing if you had seen none of the others.

Then The Avengers arrives and the scenes stop being an in-joke. The phase’s real achievement is not the crossover itself but the fact that the crossover was not necessary to enjoy any of the parts.

Show detailsWhat was not available

The reason this phase is built out of Iron Man, Thor, Hulk and Captain America rather than the more famous names is that the more famous names had been licensed elsewhere. Spider-Man was at Sony. The X-Men and the Fantastic Four were at Fox.

Almost every structural choice in the first decade of this run follows from that fact, and most of this catalogue’s separate universes exist because of it.

Everything here starts from damage. Iron Man 3 opens on a man who cannot sleep after New York. Captain America: The Winter Soldier takes the agency that assembled the team and reveals it was hollow. Avengers: Age of Ultron is about the cost of a defence system built by someone who was frightened.

It is also the phase that gambles. Guardians of the Galaxy had no famous characters, no connection to anything on screen so far, and a talking tree, and it was the point at which the run proved it could go anywhere. Ant-Man followed by being a heist film.

The pattern that holds the phase together is that the sequels got darker and the new properties got stranger, and both worked.

Captain America: Civil War splits the team over the question the run had been avoiding since the first Avengers film, which is who authorised any of it. From there the phase spends three years widening: a surgeon, a king, a thief with a spaceship, a teenager, and a woman who had been off the board since 1995.

Then it closes. Avengers: Infinity War is the rare blockbuster where the antagonist wins outright and the film simply stops, and Avengers: Endgame spends its first act on the year after that rather than on the fix.

It is the densest phase and the one that assumes the most. It is also the last time the run was a single line that everybody was reading at the same time.

Show detailsThe one that ends twice

Avengers: Endgame is the end of the story. Spider-Man: Far From Home, released two months later, is the last film of the phase, and it exists to answer the question the ending left open: what does a world do the morning after.

Reference works put both in Phase Three for that reason, which is why this catalogue does too even though almost everyone remembers the phase ending earlier.

There is a gap between the third phase and the fourth, and the phase is shaped by it. It opens not with a film but with a television series about grief, and much of what follows is about absence: the people who came back after five years, the people who did not, and the ones who inherited a name they were not sure they wanted.

It is also the phase where the shape of the thing changed. Television became part of the main story rather than a parallel to it, which means a viewer who watched only the films started missing things for the first time.

Reaction to it was mixed and remains so. What is not in dispute is that it attempted more different kinds of story than any phase before it.

The fifth phase runs through a period in which the production schedule itself became a subject of discussion. Films moved, series were cancelled, and the studio began saying out loud that it had been making too much.

What is in it is genuinely varied: a courtroom comedy, a heist across the galaxy, a Quantum Realm epic, a team film about people nobody would call heroes. What it does not have is the through-line that the first three phases had, and that is the criticism it has attracted most.

The end of it is where the shape starts to reassemble, with a run of entries that are visibly clearing the table for what comes next.

This is the phase where the licences come home. The Fantastic Four arrive as a Marvel Studios production for the first time, and the word mutant stops being contractually unavailable. Two decades of separation between the largest bodies of work in this catalogue end here.

It closes the Multiverse Saga with two Avengers films, in the same shape the Infinity Saga used, which is a deliberate rhyme rather than a coincidence.

Show detailsReading this phase while it is happening

Part of this phase is out and part of it is not, and this catalogue marks the difference on every entry rather than smoothing it over. Anything not yet released carries the window it was announced for, no runtime, and no way to mark it as watched.

Dates in this phase have moved more than once. Where they have, the entry says so.

There is very little here yet, and this catalogue is deliberately honest about that. What exists is a small number of release dates in 2028 attached to projects that have not begun filming, plus one that will be the first X-Men film made inside the connected run.

Show detailsThe phase number is not official

Reference material describes these films as expected to be part of Phase Seven rather than announced as part of it. Marvel has not designated a phase.

The number is recorded here because the source names it and files the entries under that heading, and each of those pages says the same thing in its own words. If Marvel designates something different, this is one line to change.