Change anything you like below, then build it.
Marvel Cinematic Universe · Release Order
Doomsday is not out yet, so this is a reading of what matters going in, not a ruling.
A weapons manufacturer is taken hostage, builds a way out of a cave, and comes home with a very different idea about what he wants to make.
Post-credits scene · Iron Man
Someone is waiting in Tony's house with an offer.
Nick Fury introduces himself and mentions the Avenger Initiative.
Leads to The Avengers — Four years and five films away.
An arrogant prince of an alien kingdom is stripped of his power and dumped on Earth, where nobody has any reason to be impressed by him.
Post-credits scene · Thor
Fury shows a scientist a glowing cube and asks him to study it. Someone else is in the room.
Erik Selvig is being quietly influenced by Loki, and the cube is the Tesseract.
Leads to The Avengers — This is where that film starts.
A man too small and too sick to enlist is picked for an experiment because of exactly the qualities the army had been screening out.
Opens and closes in the present day.
Post-credits scene · Captain America: The First Avenger
Steve is training in a gym, and he is not alone.
Fury tells him the world needs him for something.
Leads to The Avengers — Directly.
A spy agency spends its last favors assembling people who do not work well together, because the alternative is losing the planet.
Mid-credits scene · The Avengers
Deep in space, someone is told what attacking Earth would mean. They smile.
Thanos turns around for the first time.
Leads to Avengers: Infinity War — Six years of setup starts here.
A man out of his own time starts pulling at a thread inside the agency he works for, and something very good at killing is sent to stop him.
Mid-credits scene · Captain America: The Winter Soldier
In a facility somewhere in Europe, two people are being held in cells. Both can do things they should not be able to do.
Wanda and Pietro Maximoff, held by Baron von Strucker, with Loki's sceptre nearby.
Leads to Avengers: Age of Ultron — The film opens on this facility.
A thief steals the wrong orb and ends up in a cell with four other people who all want to kill each other slightly less than they want to get paid.
A prologue in 1988.
An attempt to build something that would let everyone go home works exactly as well as that has ever worked.
Mid-credits scene · Avengers: Age of Ultron
Someone has run out of patience with people doing his errands, and picks up a gauntlet.
Thanos: fine, I'll do it myself.
Leads to Avengers: Infinity War — And he does.
A burglar fresh out of prison is handed a suit that shrinks him, by an old man who needs a theft done and cannot do it himself.
Post-credits scene · Ant-Man
Two Avengers have a friend in a bad situation and cannot call anyone official about it.
Steve and Sam have Bucky trapped, and Sam says he knows a guy.
Leads to Captain America: Civil War — That guy is Scott.
After one operation too many goes wrong in public, the world asks the Avengers to sign something, and they do not agree about it.
Mid-credits scene · Captain America: Civil War
Somebody is put safely on ice in a country that has been keeping its abilities quiet.
Bucky goes under in Wakanda, with T'Challa's protection.
Leads to Black Panther — He is still there.
A brilliant, unbearable surgeon loses the use of his hands and chases a cure to a place that offers him something else entirely.
Mid-credits scene · Doctor Strange
A visitor arrives at the Sanctum asking for help finding a missing person.
Thor, looking for Odin.
Leads to Thor: Ragnarok — The scene is replayed there.
Still barely a team, still barely paid, and now being chased by a fleet they stole from — until someone turns up claiming to know where Peter came from.
Post-credits scene · Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
A gold woman stands over a cocoon and names what is growing inside it.
Ayesha calls him Adam.
Leads to Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 — Six years later.
A fifteen-year-old with an internship he cannot explain wants to be taken seriously, and picks a fight with people salvaging things they should not have.
Asgard is promised an ending. Thor is stranded on the far side of the galaxy with a collar around his neck and no hammer to reach for.
Mid-credits scene · Thor: Ragnarok
The refugee ship is stopped by something enormous.
Thanos's ship, the Sanctuary II.
Leads to Avengers: Infinity War — That film opens seconds later.
A new king inherits a country that has spent centuries hiding what it can do, and a challenger arrives who thinks that was a crime.
Everything that has been building for ten years arrives at once, and it is not remotely enough.
Post-credits scene · Avengers: Infinity War
As everything falls apart, someone sends one last message on a very old device.
Fury pages Captain Marvel.
Leads to Captain Marvel — The film exists to answer this.
Under house arrest and two days from freedom, Scott is pulled back into a rescue that has been thirty years in the planning.
Mid-credits scene · Ant-Man and the Wasp
A routine trip into the quantum realm goes wrong, because something has happened topside.
Everyone but Scott is dusted, leaving him stranded.
Leads to Avengers: Endgame — This is why he is missing.
A soldier in an alien war crash-lands on a planet she does not remember, with someone else's version of her own past in her head.
Mid-credits scene · Captain Marvel
Years later, the pager stops beeping, and the person who answered it is standing there.
Carol arrives at Avengers HQ.
Leads to Avengers: Endgame
What is left of the team works out what to do next. Do not watch this one first.
Spans five years.
A school trip across Europe, an adult who wants a favour, and a kid who would very much like one summer off.
Mid-credits scene · Spider-Man: Far From Home
A news broadcast makes two announcements, and the second one ruins Peter's life.
J. Jonah Jameson airs doctored footage and names Spider-Man as Peter Parker.
Leads to Spider-Man: No Way Home — The whole film is the fallout.
A sitcom that is not a sitcom, in a town that should not exist.
Set three weeks after Endgame.
Two people who both knew the same man are made to work together and to decide what a shield is for.
A version of Loki who escaped is arrested by an organization that polices the timeline itself.
On the run and off the books, Natasha goes back to the people she was raised with, which is not the same thing as family.
A prologue in 1995.
Post-credits scene · Black Widow
At a graveside, a woman with a clipboard hands out a new assignment.
Valentina points Yelena at Clint Barton.
A man parking cars in San Francisco under a name that is not his is found by the organization he ran away from.
Mid-credits scene · Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
Two Avengers join a call about the rings, and nobody can explain what they are.
Wong brings Shang-Chi and Katy to meet Banner and Carol Danvers.
Beings who have been on Earth for seven thousand years, forbidden to interfere, are forced to decide what that rule was ever for.
Reaches back to 5000 BC.
With his name public and his life falling apart, Peter asks for a spell to make everyone forget, which goes about as well as you would expect.
A girl who can punch holes between universes is being hunted, and the safest place for her is next to a man who keeps having the same dream.
A country in mourning is pushed by the rest of the world, and by a kingdom under the sea that has stayed hidden even longer than it did.
The whole family is pulled into the world under reality, where somebody has been waiting a very long time for a way out.
To save one of their own the Guardians have to go back to where he was made, and find out who made him.
The consequences of the first season's last shot, and someone having to hold the whole thing together.
Three people with light-based powers start swapping places every time they use them, which is a serious problem in a fight.
A washed-up mercenary is recruited by an organization that manages timelines, and immediately makes everything much worse.
Placement is loose on purpose; the film treats its own chronology as a joke.
A new Captain America walks into an international incident at the centre of government and cannot tell who arranged it.
A group of people who have all done unforgivable things are put in a room together, and it is not a rescue.
Four explorers come back from a trip changed, in a bright retro-futurist world that has already decided they are heroes.
Set in its own universe, not on the main timeline.
The mayor's grip tightens and the lawyer stops pretending the law is going to be enough.
Working the city alone, with nobody left who remembers who he is.
The one everything has been pointing at. Out in December; nothing here spoils it, because nobody has seen it.
Not out yet. Marvel has announced a cast; until the film exists, printing one here would be repeating rumour as fact — and the reveals are exactly what this site is for.
