Universes

This is the one people mean when they say the shared universe. It began in 2008 with a single film that had no guarantee of a second, and it now carries the majority of the catalogue. If a title belongs here, it can assume you have seen the ones before it, and later ones will assume you have seen it.

For two decades these were simply a different set of films about different characters, with their own continuity and their own contradictions. Watching them requires nothing from the connected run and gives nothing back to it, until very late, when the multiverse made both true at once.

These films proved the material could carry a blockbuster, which is part of why the connected run happened at all. They were never designed to join anything, and their later inclusion is something the multiverse films did to them rather than something they set up.

Two films, made in parallel with the shared run and legally unable to acknowledge it. They are the clearest illustration of how film rights, rather than storytelling, shaped which characters could appear together for most of this period.

An odd premise the films never entirely resolve: a world assembled from one character’s orbit without the character at the centre of it. Knowing why, that the rights were split, makes the shape of these films legible rather than baffling.

This is a Marvel Studios film in the same run as the others, set in a universe that is not the one the run takes place in. The choice was made for a reason that is easy to check and hard to argue with: putting the team on their own Earth means nobody has to explain where they were when half of the connected universe disappeared.

What you get instead is a version of the 1960s that kept going, with the technology people in 1964 expected to have by now. Nothing here requires anything from the shared continuity, which makes it one of the easiest entries in the catalogue to start from.

Blade, the older Fantastic Four films, Ghost Rider, Elektra, the Punisher films. They are included here and marked as separate rather than left out, because their characters keep re-entering the connected run and because a guide that only covers the connected films cannot explain where any of this came from.