Full spoilers for the Marvel movies and shows discussed below, along with publicly released Avengers: Doomsday footage.

If you are trying to figure out what to watch before Avengers: Doomsday, Marvel has made the assignment surprisingly clear. Disney+ has assembled a “Countdown to Avengers: Doomsday” collection reaching from the original X-Men movies through the Infinity Saga, Loki, the Multiverse Saga, Thunderbolts* and The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Taken at face value, it is a useful viewing guide. Taken as a piece of story design, it is much more revealing.

Quick answer: Marvel’s recommended Avengers: Doomsday watchlist includes the following 15 movie and television entries. Watching them covers the characters, relationships and multiverse rules Marvel appears to consider most useful before Doomsday.

1. X-Men
2. X2: X-Men United
3. Captain America: The First Avenger
4. The Avengers
5. Avengers: Infinity War
6. Avengers: Endgame
7. Loki Seasons 1 and 2
8. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
9. Spider-Man: No Way Home
10. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
11. Captain America: Brave New World
12. Deadpool & Wolverine
13. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
14. Thunderbolts*
15. The Fantastic Four: First Steps

There is the practical answer. The craft question is why Marvel chose these stories when dozens of other MCU and X-Men projects could plausibly qualify as homework. Why start with X-Men and X2 while leaving out Days of Future Past? Why include Brave New World while skipping The Falcon and the Winter Soldier? Why refresh Endgame but leave Civil War on the shelf? And why bring Robert Downey Jr. back as Doctor Doom without assigning the audience a single solo Iron Man movie?

My thesis is that Marvel’s Doomsday watchlist functions as dramatic priming. These stories preload the audience with the moral arguments, unresolved costs, multiverse rules and character positions that Doctor Doom can attack when the larger crisis begins. If that reading is right, Disney has given us something considerably more useful than a list of characters we should recognize. It has given us a map of the pressure points Doomsday may be preparing to squeeze.

The Tool

Dramatic priming is the process of loading an audience with a relationship, value, wound, rule or unresolved cost before a later crisis forces that material to matter. A writer establishes what a character wants before threatening it, establishes a belief before testing it, and establishes the rules before making someone decide whether those rules are worth obeying. When the crisis finally arrives, the story can move directly into pressure because the audience already understands what the choice will cost.

Think of it as setting a chessboard. The drama gets considerably more interesting when the pieces already have positions, relationships and strategies before somebody declares check. Avengers: Doomsday has an especially difficult version of that problem because Marvel is bringing together Avengers, X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Wakandan characters, Shang-Chi, the New Avengers, Loki and others across multiple realities. A movie that size cannot afford to spend its first hour giving everybody an orientation packet.

Marvel therefore has a strong incentive to make the earlier stories carry some of that weight. Doomsday can remind us of details when necessary, but it gains enormous dramatic efficiency if we already know why Xavier and Magneto disagree, what Steve Rogers has sacrificed, what Loki learned about freedom, what an incursion can cost and why Reed Richards would be particularly vulnerable when his family is threatened. The playlist begins to make sense once you judge each selection by what Doomsday would otherwise have to build from scratch.

That approach also solves one of the nastiest problems in giant ensemble storytelling: everybody needs a reason to exist beyond recognition. A cameo gives the audience a face. Dramatic priming gives that face a desire, fear, value and history that can collide with somebody else. Marvel already owns the faces; the playlist appears designed to reload the conflict.

On Screen

X-Men And X2 Prime The Moral Problem

The decision to begin with X-Men is one of the most revealing choices on the list. If Marvel simply wanted viewers to remember the Fox-era roster, later movies could accomplish that job faster and with more characters. The 2000 film earns its place because it establishes the philosophical relationship between Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr, and that relationship gives Doomsday something far more useful than mutant continuity.

Xavier and Magneto want the same fundamental thing: mutants must survive. Their conflict comes from radically different answers about how survival should be secured. Xavier believes humans and mutants can eventually coexist, while Magneto sees human fear as an existential threat and believes mutant survival may require force before humans get the chance to strike first. The famous chess game between them works because they remain friends while occupying opposing moral positions; the board between them makes their entire relationship visible.

In The Anatomy of Story, John Truby writes that a storyteller should “make sure each character takes a different approach to the hero’s central moral problem.” That principle is particularly valuable in an ensemble because it allows many characters to participate in one argument without collapsing into interchangeable heroes. Xavier and Magneto have already spent multiple movies proving how dramatically fertile that structure can be.

X2 sharpens the idea through action. William Stryker forces Xavier to use Cerebro against every mutant mind on Earth, and Magneto eventually takes control of the same system and redirects Xavier toward humanity instead. The weapon remains the same while the moral choice changes, which gives the scene its power: both Stryker and Magneto justify mass killing through existential fear, and Xavier becomes the instrument through which those beliefs gain physical consequence.

Now scale that old conflict up to an incursion. Marvel has publicly described Doomsday as bringing heroes from three universes onto a collision course, which immediately creates a larger version of Xavier and Magneto’s original problem. If protecting one reality threatens another, every major character can want survival while disagreeing violently about what survival permits them to sacrifice.

Xavier can keep searching for a solution that preserves everyone. Magneto can decide that refusing to choose is another way of allowing his people to die. Reed Richards can believe intellect gives him a path nobody else can see, while Steve Rogers can reject any solution that turns innocent lives into numbers on a board. Loki has already experienced the cost of controlling reality in the name of stability, and Doom can arrive believing the chaos itself proves that somebody finally has to take control.

That is how an enormous cast stays readable. The audience does not need 25 separate subplots competing for oxygen if the central crisis forces multiple characters to answer the same moral question from different positions. The first two X-Men films prime exactly that kind of argument, which makes their placement at the front of the list feel much more deliberate than a simple nostalgia play.

The Avengers Movies Prime The Moral Debt

The Avengers portion of the playlist creates another striking pattern because Marvel jumps from The First Avenger to The Avengers, then directly to Infinity War and Endgame. That progression gives us sacrifice, assembly, catastrophic failure and the decision to rewrite that failure. Sitting underneath all four stories is a recurring MCU idea that becomes especially potent once Doctor Doom starts accusing people of living lives they were never supposed to have.

I keep coming back to Mordo’s warning in Doctor Strange: “The bill always comes due.” I call that moral debt — the delayed consequence created when a character solves an immediate problem through an extraordinary exception. The initial choice can be emotionally justified and even heroic, while the story preserves the right to ask what that choice cost later.

Steve Rogers gives us the cleanest example. Captain America: The First Avenger ends by making him surrender the life he wants in order to save everyone else. He puts the Valkyrie into the ice, wakes decades later and understands the loss immediately when Nick Fury tries to orient him to the present: “I had a date.” Steve saves millions of lives, and the cost is Peggy Carter and the ordinary future he imagined with her.

Endgame eventually closes that wound by giving Steve a path back to Peggy. The emotional payoff works because The First Avenger made the original sacrifice hurt; the dance has meaning because we remember the date he missed. Marvel therefore has an unusually rich piece of material available in Doomsday when the new footage shows Steve living with a child while Doom accuses the assembled heroes of having lived “stolen lives.”

That accusation does not retroactively make Steve’s ending wrong. It gives an opponent a way to pressure the ending by offering a competing interpretation of its cost. Steve earned that dance emotionally, but he reached it through a saga in which the Avengers manipulated time, removed Infinity Stones from other eras, created new branches and refused to accept the permanence of a cosmic defeat. Doom can look at the victory from outside the Avengers’ emotional experience and ask whether somebody else inherited the bill.

Infinity War makes that question even more useful because Steve already states his moral position clearly. Vision suggests destroying the Mind Stone even though the act will kill him, and Steve responds, “We don’t trade lives.” It is a perfect Captain America principle: Steve refuses to turn another person into a necessary sacrifice simply because the arithmetic makes that sacrifice convenient.

The movie then attacks that principle from every possible direction. Wanda ultimately kills Vision anyway in an attempt to stop Thanos, Thanos reverses the sacrifice and kills him again, Doctor Strange gives away the Time Stone because he has seen a path nobody else understands, and Thor’s emotional need for revenge costs him the fastest possible kill. The heroes remain morally recognizable while the pressure exposes how difficult their principles become when every available choice carries a body count.

Robert McKee’s Principle of Antagonism gives us a useful way to think about Doom’s job here. In Story, McKee writes, “A protagonist and his story can only be as intellectually fascinating and emotionally compelling as the forces of antagonism make them.” Doom therefore gains dramatic power by attacking the heroes at the level of belief instead of merely overpowering them in combat.

Steve believes there must be a path that preserves innocent life, so Doom needs circumstances that make that path appear impossible. Reed’s intelligence becomes dramatically vulnerable when the “correct” solution carries an unbearable human cost. Xavier’s faith in coexistence becomes vulnerable when two realities are destroying one another simply by continuing to exist, and Loki’s commitment to free choice becomes vulnerable when freedom appears to produce more catastrophic branches than anyone can save.

That is the difference between a villain with bigger powers and an opponent built for the heroes standing across from him. Thanos forced the Avengers to experience loss. Doom has the opportunity to make them account for what they did after the loss happened, especially when Endgame gave them the tools to refuse a result the universe had already imposed.

Remember what the Avengers actually do in Endgame. They spend five years living inside the consequences of the Snap, then Scott Lang returns with a possibility and Tony Stark discovers a way to navigate time. The team decides that history can be intervened upon, gathers Infinity Stones from earlier moments and brings the vanished population back into existence. The audience cheers because the story has spent five years making us ache for exactly that reversal.

The victory also produces complications. Loki escapes with the Tesseract, Gamora enters a future she did not originally inhabit, Thanos and his army leave 2014 and die in another era, and Steve ultimately chooses a life with Peggy after returning the Stones. Marvel has spent years exploring the multiverse that grows out of this broader period of reality-bending, which gives Doom a reservoir of consequences he can point toward even if the final movie ultimately rejects his conclusions.

That is why I love the phrase “stolen lives” as an antagonist premise. Doom can look at Steve’s family, Loki’s continued existence, Peter Parker’s attempts to manipulate reality, Strange’s multiversal interference and every other reclaimed second chance and ask the heroes to consider what they never had to see. He can turn their happiest exceptions into evidence for his case without erasing the emotional truth that made those choices understandable in the first place.

Loki And The Multiverse Films Prime The Rulebook

The middle of the watchlist performs a different craft function. Loki, No Way Home, Multiverse of Madness and Deadpool & Wolverine collectively teach the audience how to feel about a reality crisis before Doomsday has to dramatize one. Marvel has introduced branches, variants, the TVA, the Void, incursions, dying timelines and other concepts across several projects, but the useful story material underneath those terms is much simpler: choices can damage worlds, other realities contain real people, and saving one existence can create costs somewhere else.

Loki is probably the most important project in this section because it turns the multiverse into a moral problem. At the end of Season 1, Loki and Sylvie reach He Who Remains and discover that the stability surrounding the Sacred Timeline was purchased through enormous control. The TVA protects order by pruning branches and erasing lives that threaten the system, which means the apparent safety of the universe depends on somebody deciding which possibilities are allowed to exist.

Sylvie kills He Who Remains because she refuses to accept that bargain, and Season 2 makes Loki live inside the consequences. By the finale, Loki understands that simply preserving the old machine would restore stability through the same denial of choice. He destroys the Loom, takes the dying branches into his hands and becomes the figure holding an open multiverse together, sacrificing his own freedom so everyone else can retain theirs.

That gives Doom a fascinating character to oppose because Loki already understands the seduction of control. Loki has seen chaos threaten existence and has also seen what happens when a powerful authority solves chaos by dictating which lives are permitted to continue. If Doom concludes that uncontrolled realities inevitably destroy one another, Loki becomes living evidence that the moral cost of order matters just as much as the order itself.

No Way Home contributes another necessary piece by making alternate realities emotionally legible. Tom Holland’s Peter meets other Peter Parkers who share the same heroic identity while carrying entirely different relationships, failures and wounds. Andrew Garfield’s Peter still carries Gwen Stacy’s death, and the moment he saves MJ works because one universe gives him a chance to act differently inside the emotional echo of another.

That lesson becomes crucial once a story starts asking audiences to care about entire realities. An incursion loses most of its dramatic power if Universe B feels like disposable scenery. No Way Home teaches the audience to attach human meaning to alternate worlds because another universe contains another Peter, another person he loved, another grief he could not fix and another life with its own claim to continue.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness then supplies the term that can turn those emotional claims into conflict: incursion. The Illuminati explain that destructive interference between realities can cause universes to collide, and their own Doctor Strange becomes the cautionary example. His attempt to find a solution to Thanos through forbidden multiversal methods saves one reality while helping destroy another.

The mechanism matters because it converts “save the universe” from a simple heroic desire into an argument. If two realities are colliding and both cannot continue unchanged, everybody can sincerely want to save existence while disagreeing about which lives carry the obligation to sacrifice. Suddenly Steve’s “we don’t trade lives” faces its largest possible stress test because the numbers are no longer one person against billions; they may be one universe against another.

Deadpool & Wolverine helps move that machinery into a broader blockbuster language. The TVA, the Void and the decay of a timeline become part of a story centered on Wade’s desperate attempt to keep his home from disappearing. Whatever terminology Doomsday ultimately emphasizes, Marvel has already spent several projects teaching the audience the emotional sentence underneath all of it: my home is dying, and somebody has to decide what survives.

That is dramatic priming at its most practical. Doomsday can begin further down the track because the earlier movies have already paid for portions of the exposition. Instead of teaching the audience every theoretical rule from zero, the movie can spend more time putting familiar rules under new pressure and watching characters make choices inside them.

The Newer Movies Prime The Starting Positions

The more recent selections on the watchlist have a slightly different job. Shang-Chi, Wakanda Forever, Brave New World, Thunderbolts* and First Steps place important characters and factions in present-tense positions before Doomsday begins. The audience needs enough information to understand where everyone stands when the collision starts, which allows the crossover to spend its time changing those positions instead of inventing them.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings gives Marvel a protagonist whose introduction still contains an unresolved piece of larger machinery. Wong, Bruce Banner and Carol Danvers examine the Ten Rings in the post-credits scene and cannot identify their origin, while the Rings themselves appear to be sending a beacon. The eventual explanation may or may not become central to Doomsday, but Shang-Chi enters the crossover carrying both a defined character and a power source with unfinished narrative business.

Wakanda Forever is more useful at the level of political pressure. Wakanda and Talokan are both civilizations shaped by the fear that exposure will allow outsiders to exploit or destroy what they have protected. Shuri and Namor spend the movie responding differently to that fear, and their eventual agreement preserves both peoples without erasing the distrust underneath it.

That makes Wakanda and Talokan ready-made dramatic participants in an existential crisis. They already know what it feels like to believe the future of their people depends on distrusting the outside world, so an incursion does not need to invent fear for them. The pressure simply grows large enough to test the choices they have already made.

Brave New World becomes more revealing when compared with the project Marvel left off the list. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier gives us the fuller journey of Sam Wilson wrestling with the meaning of Captain America, while Brave New World gives us Sam after he has accepted the mantle and begun operating from that position. For a crossover, the latter is dramatically efficient because Doomsday needs to know what Sam intends to do now more than it needs to replay how he became the man carrying the shield.

Sam also arrives while the Avengers identity itself is unsettled, which leads directly into Thunderbolts*. Yelena, Bucky, Red Guardian, Ghost, U.S. Agent and Bob emerge from that story as a team, and Valentina publicly brands them the New Avengers. Marvel therefore enters Doomsday with competing claims around the Avengers name already active rather than waiting for the crossover to manufacture disagreement.

That is an excellent ensemble shortcut because conflict arrives with the characters. Sam Wilson carries one idea of what Captain America and the Avengers should represent, Bucky carries his history with Steve and the original team, John Walker carries his complicated relationship with the same iconography, and Yelena’s experience has taught her to value the messy people who actually choose to stand beside one another. The movie can put those values into collision before Doom ever walks into the room.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps may be the most important present-tense setup of all because it gives Doctor Doom something every huge villain needs: personal access to the protagonists. Reed, Sue, Johnny and Ben enter the next Avengers movie as a functioning family, Franklin sits at the center of their emotional stakes, and the current Doomsday footage establishes that Sue remembers Victor as someone who once possessed kindness before catastrophic loss changed him.

That relationship gives Doom dramatic weight that raw scale cannot manufacture. Marvel can always add another army, another portal or another universe cracking across the sky, but Reed confronting a man he once knew creates pressure the audience can understand without a billion-dollar visual effect. Sue’s description of Victor also connects his rage to loss, which places him in immediate thematic proximity to a saga full of heroes who repeatedly fought against losing the people they loved.

That is where the “stolen lives” accusation becomes particularly sharp. Doom appears to be a man who lost everything he loved looking at heroes who found ways, through sacrifice, magic, time travel, resurrection or sheer refusal, to recover pieces of their own lives after catastrophe. Reed has his family. Steve appears to have a child. Thor has Love. Loki survived in a form that became central to the multiverse. Doom’s grief can turn those reclaimed lives into the source of his resentment and his argument.

The Missing Movies Expose The Selection Logic

The omissions are where the watchlist becomes especially useful as evidence. A curated list only tells us something when it excludes plausible alternatives, and Marvel leaves out several projects that would be obvious choices for a general continuity refresher. Those absences do not prove plot details, but they help reveal which pieces of history Disney currently seems most interested in keeping near the audience’s emotional memory.

X-Men: Days of Future Past is the first major omission. On paper it feels tailor-made for a multiverse Avengers movie because it involves altered history, restored lives and Xavier and Magneto navigating another existential mutant crisis. Yet Marvel sends viewers back to X-Men and X2, which places greater emphasis on the original ideological relationship between Xavier and Magneto than on the old franchise’s time-travel mechanics.

That choice strengthens the moral-argument reading. Doomsday already has plenty of newer projects capable of teaching audiences about altered realities and broken timelines. What X-Men and X2 uniquely supply is the memory of two men who love many of the same people, fear many of the same dangers and still reach opposite conclusions about what survival requires.

Civil War is another fascinating absence because it is the MCU’s definitive Avengers fracture movie. If the central preparation needed for Doomsday were simply “remember that superheroes can disagree,” Civil War would be an obvious assignment. Marvel instead preserves a narrower Avengers progression through The Avengers, Infinity War and Endgame: the team assembles, the team fails, and the survivors decide to undo the failure.

That progression keeps our attention on the consequence of heroic refusal. The Avengers will not accept Thanos’s victory as permanent, and the audience loves them for it. Doom now has the opportunity to ask whether reality absorbed costs while the heroes celebrated getting everyone back, which is a much more specific line of antagonism than reopening the Sokovia Accords debate.

The absence of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier works similarly. Marvel could have assigned the audience Sam Wilson’s complete transition into Captain America, yet the list chooses the movie where that transition is already behind him. That suggests Doomsday needs Sam as a present-tense leader carrying responsibility into the crisis, which is more efficient than spending crossover time re-establishing doubts he has already resolved.

The Marvels is perhaps the strangest continuity omission because Monica Rambeau ends that film stranded in another reality and encounters Beast. That certainly sounds relevant to a movie involving X-Men characters and colliding universes. Its absence suggests Marvel believes Monica’s specific situation can either be explained economically or is less essential to the central dramatic argument than the stories the company did choose to highlight.

And then we get to the omission I cannot stop thinking about: there is no solo Iron Man movie. Robert Downey Jr. is playing Victor Von Doom, which means the audience will bring nearly two decades of Tony Stark memory into the theater before Victor says a word. Disney could easily lean into that history by putting Iron Man at the front of the assignment, yet the current watchlist leaves Tony’s solo trilogy out entirely.

I would be careful about turning that into a lore theory because a streaming playlist cannot prove what Doom’s face means inside the movie. As audience management, however, the choice is fascinating. Marvel appears comfortable letting viewers carry their existing memory of RDJ through the Avengers saga while First Steps and the new Doomsday material establish Victor’s relationships, losses and emotional context on their own terms.

That gives the casting a very specific craft challenge. The audience will inevitably feel Tony Stark when it looks at Robert Downey Jr., while the story needs Victor Von Doom to become a dramatic person with his own desires and wounds rather than a two-billion-dollar piece of stunt casting. If the movie uses that recognition to make Steve, Thor and the audience emotionally uncomfortable while still allowing Reed and Sue’s history with Victor to define him, the familiar face becomes pressure instead of distraction.

And that brings us back to why the playlist is so useful. Marvel does not appear to be asking viewers to memorize every relevant plot thread before December. It is refreshing the material that would be expensive for Doomsday to reconstruct inside a movie already carrying an enormous cast: relationships, beliefs, consequential rules and unresolved emotional costs.

The Takeaway

The transferable craft lesson here is straightforward: prime the values before you force the choice. If the climax of your story will make a character choose between family and duty, the audience needs to understand the value of both before the crisis arrives. If two allies are eventually going to become opponents, establish the belief that can divide them. If a character will violate a rule to save somebody they love, make the rule and the relationship meaningful enough that the violation carries an actual price.

Dramatic priming becomes even more important as a cast gets larger because a writer needs a common pressure capable of organizing many different people. Truby’s character-web approach gives each major character a different relationship to the same moral problem, while McKee’s antagonism forces those positions toward increasingly difficult consequences. The result is an ensemble where people can share the same goal and still create drama every time they enter the same room.

That is exactly what Doomsday needs. “Save existence” is large enough to unite everybody, but it becomes dramatically useful only when Steve, Xavier, Magneto, Reed, Loki, Sam and Doom attach different values and acceptable costs to the same desire. The spectacle can then grow out of those disagreements rather than asking spectacle to replace them.

Doctor Doom becomes especially dangerous if he can identify a pattern the heroes themselves would rather avoid confronting. Again and again, Marvel’s protagonists become willing to make extraordinary exceptions when someone they love is on the line. Steve changes the shape of his life to return to Peggy, Peter interferes with Strange’s spell while trying to preserve the people around him, Strange repeatedly uses dangerous tools when he believes the outcome justifies them, and Loki eventually takes cosmic responsibility for keeping everyone else’s choices alive.

Doom can take that history and push it toward the ugliest possible question: what happens when every person in the room has somebody they refuse to sacrifice, but reality itself demands a cost? The heroes may eventually prove his solution monstrous, but the story becomes stronger if they first have to admit that Doom has found the exact place where their principles become hardest to live by.

So What?

This is why Disney’s watchlist has me more interested in Avengers: Doomsday than a normal “watch these before the movie” collection ever should. The list begins by returning us to Xavier and Magneto across a chessboard, two old friends trying to protect the same people while disagreeing about what survival allows them to do. From there, it takes us through Steve sacrificing his future, the Avengers refusing to accept catastrophic loss, Loki choosing freedom at enormous personal cost, and multiple stories teaching us that reality itself can break when characters reach across universes trying to save what they love.

The pressure then arrives at Doctor Doom. The current footage frames Victor through catastrophic loss and gives him an accusation aimed directly at heroes who have reclaimed lives, relationships and futures after earlier stories took them away. That creates a clean escalation from the starting proof beat to the crisis ahead: Xavier and Magneto argue over what survival permits when one people feels threatened, while Doom appears ready to force that same argument onto entire universes and demand that the heroes account for the exceptions they have made along the way.

That progression is dramatic priming. Marvel has spent years establishing beliefs, relationships, rules and costs that Doomsday can now place under a single, unbearable pressure. The craft lesson works far beyond Marvel: the bigger your climax becomes, the more important it is to make the audience understand what the characters value before the crisis makes them choose.

Marvel has already set the board. Doom just has to force the move.

Next time you watch anything — Marvel or not — track what the story primes before the crisis. Dramatic priming always reveals character. And character, not spectacle, is what makes a story stick.