Questions

Iron Man, from 2008. It is the film this whole thing was built out of, it assumes nothing, and it is a self-contained story about an arms manufacturer who changes his mind. If you watch it and do not want more, you have not been left holding anything unfinished.

There is a case for starting elsewhere. Captain Marvel is set in 1995 and comes first in story order. Guardians of the Galaxy requires nothing and is the least like homework. Moon Knight is connected to almost nothing at all. Any of those work.

What does not work is starting at Avengers: Infinity War because somebody told you it is the good one. It is, and it is the payoff for eighteen films.

No, and almost nobody has. The catalogue is a record of what exists, not a list of homework.

The timeline has three levels for exactly this. Films only is the cinema run on its own, which is the spine and about eighty hours. Plus series adds the television that carries the main story, which since 2021 is not really optional, and takes it to about a hundred and sixty. Plus everything else adds the shorts, the specials, the older television and the films made by other studios, and that is where the number stops being something a person does in a year.

If you want one answer: plus series, in release order. That is the whole story with nothing important missing.

Release order, the first time. Every one of these films was made assuming you had seen the ones before it and not the ones after, and the surprises are built on that. Story order hands you several of them early.

The clearest example is Captain Marvel. It is set in 1995, so story order puts it first, which means meeting a character whose entire introduction depends on you already caring about the people she is coming back for.

Story order is genuinely interesting on a rewatch, when nothing can be spoiled and the shape of the history becomes the point. The timeline switches between the two with one control.

The timeline counts it for you, and the number changes with the level you pick and with what you have already marked as watched.

Roughly: the films alone are about eighty hours. Films and the series that carry the main story are about a hundred and sixty. Everything, including the older television and the other studios’ films, is closer to eight hundred.

At two hours a night, the middle number is about eleven weeks.

Mark what you remember in the timeline, and the list will show you where the gap starts. The tracking is a checkbox on every row and it stays in your browser.

If you stopped after Avengers: Endgame, which is where most people did, the honest answer is that the thing you come back to is not the same shape. The single line became several, television became part of the plot, and the story stopped building toward one ending.

Start with WandaVision and Loki. Between them they explain what changed, and almost everything after leans on both.

Before 2021, films were the whole story and there is nothing to miss. From WandaVision onward that stops being true.

The clearest case is Loki. It ends by changing the rules the rest of the story runs on, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness proceeds as though you were there. WandaVision is the same: the film treats a character’s position as established, and it was established across six hours of television you did not watch.

You can stay with the films. You will follow the plots. You will keep meeting people who have visibly been through something you did not see.

For twenty years, no. Marvel had licensed those characters to other studios before it started making its own films, which is why the connected run was built out of Iron Man and Thor rather than Spider-Man and the X-Men. The Fox films and the Sony films are separate continuities made by separate companies.

That has been coming apart since 2021. Spider-Man: No Way Home put three studios’ Spider-Men in one film. Deadpool & Wolverine crossed properly. The Fantastic Four: First Steps is a Marvel Studios film, and the first X-Men film made inside the connected run is scheduled for 2028.

You do not need any of them to follow the main story. They are in this catalogue because their characters keep walking into it.

Yes, and the catalogue will not pretend otherwise.

Nothing later depends on Thor: The Dark World, Iron Man 2 or The Incredible Hulk in a way you would notice, though all three set up things you will meet elsewhere. The Marvel Television era is a self-contained body of work: skipping it costs you nothing in the films. The One-Shots are four to fifteen minutes each and are bonus material by design.

What you cannot skip without feeling it: the Avengers films, the Captain America films, Guardians of the Galaxy, and from 2021 onward WandaVision and Loki.

The watch paths on this site are exactly this question answered several different ways.

They are the studio’s own way of dividing its output, and they are editorial rather than something anybody inside the story knows about.

A phase is a numbered block of releases, like a season of a very long series. Phase One is 2008 to 2012 and ends with The Avengers. There are seven so far, and the seventh has not been officially designated.

A saga is a group of phases with one story running through them. Phases one to three are the Infinity Saga and end with Avengers: Endgame. Phases four to six are the Multiverse Saga.

Both are useful for finding your place and neither tells you what to watch.

Yes, and it is one of the few genuinely universal rules here.

The convention started with Iron Man, whose scene after the credits is where the word Avengers is said for the first time. Since then almost every entry has one or two, and they range from a joke to the introduction of a character the next three films are about.

There is no way to know in advance which kind you are getting, which is the point. Where a scene matters enough to change what you should watch next, this catalogue records it as a connection on the title’s own page.

This catalogue does not say, on purpose.

Streaming rights move constantly and differ by country, so any answer written here would be wrong somewhere in the world on the day it was written and wrong everywhere within a year. A guide that ages that badly is worse than no guide, because it looks authoritative while being out of date.

What this site can tell you is what exists, what order it goes in, how long it takes and what depends on what. Where to find a given title is a question for a service that updates daily, and there are several.

Until 2019 this story had one timeline. Everything happened in one place to one set of people, and that was the whole architecture.

From 2021, starting with the series Loki, that stops being true. The single protected timeline is revealed to be one branch among infinitely many, each a version of the same universe where something went differently, and the thing that had been keeping it single is removed on purpose.

The practical consequence is that stories which looked finished are not. Characters from other studios’ films, made decades ago in continuities that had nothing to do with this one, can now walk in as versions from another universe. Almost everything from Phase Four onward passes through this idea.

The event at the centre of Avengers: Infinity War. The antagonist collects six objects, uses them, and half of every living thing in the universe disappears at random. The film ends there, without undoing it.

It lasts five years inside the story. For the people left behind those five years pass normally, with funerals and support groups and a world that gets smaller. For the people who disappeared, no time passes at all: they come back in Avengers: Endgame exactly as they were, into a world that has moved on without them.

That gap is where most of the emotional material in the years afterwards comes from. A teenager comes back to find his classmates are five years older than he is.

Six objects, each controlling one fundamental aspect of reality: space, mind, reality, power, time and soul. Any single one makes its holder the most dangerous thing in a solar system. All six together let one person do anything at all, once.

The clever part is the pacing. They are introduced one at a time across a decade in films that appear to be about something else entirely, so the audience is usually several steps ahead of the characters, and the story that collects them does not need to explain what they are.

They also have a beginning and an end. By the time the Infinity Saga closes, they have been destroyed.

A warlord from a dead world who believes the universe has too many people in it and intends to remove half of them, at random, in a single act.

He appears for a few seconds at a time across six years, in films that have nothing to do with him, before the film about him arrives. That is deliberate: by the time he turns up properly the audience has been told to be afraid of him by four different sets of characters.

What makes him work is that the films never give him a lie to hide behind. He believes what he says, applies it to himself, and nobody delivers the speech that proves him wrong. The story shows the result instead.

That its own sources say it happens somewhere other than the timeline the main story runs on.

Some are obvious: What If…? is an anthology of divergences and says so. Marvel Zombies continues one of them. Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man states outright that it is a different timeline.

Some are less obvious. Deadpool & Wolverine is a Marvel Studios film in a numbered phase, and it takes place on Earth-10005, which is where the Fox X-Men films happen. The Fantastic Four: First Steps is set on Earth-828 for a reason the film-makers have explained.

This catalogue marks all of them the same way, on the row and on the page, and none of them are hidden. The flag follows what a source says, not the medium and not the studio.

Because Marvel had sold the film rights before it started making films. In the 1990s the company licensed the X-Men and mutants to 20th Century Fox and Spider-Man to Sony, and when it later set up its own studio those were the characters it could not use.

That single fact shapes the entire first decade. The connected run was built out of Iron Man, Thor, Hulk and Captain America because they were what was left.

It went further than casting. Wanda and Pietro Maximoff sat on the line: both studios claimed them, and the settlement was that both could use them provided neither pointed at the other’s property. The Marvel films could not say the word mutant or name Magneto. The Fox films could not call them Avengers.

This one is a real answer to a real question, so it is behind a warning rather than in the open. If you have not seen Avengers: Endgame, close this.

Major spoiler

Tony Stark dies. He uses the Infinity Stones himself in the final battle, destroys Thanos and his army, and does not survive it. He leaves a wife and a daughter.

Steve Rogers survives, returns the Stones to the moments they were taken from, and stays. He lives the life he was cheated out of with Peggy Carter, comes back as an old man, and hands the shield and the name to Sam Wilson.

Natasha Romanoff dies earlier, on Vormir, giving her life so the team can have the Soul Stone. She does not come back.

Because they are copyrighted, and hosting them would put the project at legal risk and pass that risk to anybody who forked it.

Every mark, emblem and glyph you see here was drawn in this repository as vector artwork and generated from the data. That is a constraint rather than a preference, and it turned out to be the reason the site looks like itself instead of like every other site about these films.

It is one of five rules that a change to this project cannot break, and it is checked automatically.

Every entry carries its sources and the date somebody last opened them. Those are on the page, at the bottom, as links you can follow.

The rule the project runs on is that a source is opened and read before a fact is written, never recalled and given a plausible link afterwards. That rule exists because it was broken here first: the earliest entries were written from memory with real URLs attached that nobody had opened, and checking them found two wrong runtimes out of six. Famous facts, complete confidence, still wrong.

Where two sources disagree, both are recorded and the disagreement is explained rather than settled quietly. There are several of those in here, and they are usually the most interesting thing on the page.

Usually because of a convention, and the convention is written down.

A release date here is the United States theatrical date. Many of these films opened elsewhere first, sometimes by weeks, so first-release-anywhere would reorder the run against how almost every source describes it. A few older films never had a United States cinema release at all: those carry their first release, and their page says which kind it was.

A series runtime is per episode, and where a source gives a range this records the median. The total for a season is that figure times the episode count.

Where a source contradicts itself, this catalogue records what the source’s own data field says and puts the contradiction on the page.

Into your browser and nowhere else. No request carries it, there is no account, and there is no server that could store it even if somebody wanted to.

That has a consequence worth knowing: clearing your site data, using a private window, or switching to another device loses it. So the timeline has an export button that writes a small file, and an import button that reads one back. That is the only way progress moves between devices, and it moves because you moved it.

Every page here works correctly with storage switched off entirely. It is an enhancement, never a requirement.

Yes, and a wrong date you noticed is a real contribution even if you never touch the code.

The whole site is one public repository. Every page has an edit link at the bottom that lands on the exact file behind it. Fixing a fact is editing one file, adding the source, and opening a pull request, which can be done entirely in a browser.

Translating is the same shape and needs no coding at all: copy a file from the English directory, translate the sentences, open a pull request. Adding a whole new language is one entry in a config file and a new directory. If it ever looks like you need to change code to add a language, that is a bug in the code.

Three different reasons, and the row will tell you which.

If it is not in the list at all, the second control is filtering it out. The Marvel Television era, the shorts, the older television and the other studios’ films all sit at the fullest level.

If it is at the very bottom with a window instead of a year, it is not out yet. Announced entries sort last, carry no runtime, and cannot be marked as watched.

If it carries an Earth designation next to its franchise, it is part of this run but its story happens somewhere else, and it stays in the list for that reason.