The Marvel Studios franchise is impressively complex. Each of the 10 existing movies takes place in the same universe, and most include Easter egg clues about upcoming storylines—like Thanos showing up at the end of The Avengers.
One dedicated fan from Comic Archive has decided to simplify matters by making a chronological supercut of every Marvel movie and TV show. Beginning with Thor‘s ancient Asgardian history and moving onto the World War II scenes from Captain America: The First Avenger, this YouTube video shows how to cut all your Marvel movies into a single omnibus.
This isn’t the first time someone has put together a timeline for the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), but each time a new movie comes out, more stuff gets added—and it’s not always in chronological order. Iron Man 3 and Guardians of the Galaxy both included flashbacks to earlier years, and Agent Carter will explore S.H.I.E.L.D.’s 1940s origins.
Marvel released its own timeline to coincide with The Avengers in 2012, but since then we’ve seen several new movies plus Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which ran alongside Thor: The Dark World and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. One particularly interesting sequence to look out for is when Thor, Iron Man 2 and The Incredible Hulk overlap in a one-week period, and Agent Coulson has to divide his time between Thor and Tony Stark. This was back during Phase 1 of the franchise (the first few movies leading up to The Avengers), and shows just how intricately plotted the MCU can be.
This kind of supercut showcases the complex nature of Marvel’s interlocking storylines, but it’s probably not as satisfying as just watching the individual movies. Marvel strikes a decent balance between franchise-wide worldbuilding and keeping movies accessible, so hopefully it can keep this going in Phase 3.
Photo via Marvel