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 actually made the assignment pretty manageable. Disney+ has assembled a 15-project countdown that reaches from the original X-Men movies through the Infinity Saga, Loki, the Multiverse Saga, the New Avengers and The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
The list works perfectly well as a viewing guide. But the more interesting question is why Marvel chose these particular 15 stories when dozens of other movies and shows could plausibly count as Doomsday homework. Once you start looking at what the selections establish — and what Disney leaves out — the watchlist starts looking less like a continuity checklist and more like a blueprint for the movie’s dramatic pressure.
Disney+’s current Avengers: Doomsday countdown contains these 15 Marvel entries:
If you have time, watch all 15. But the list becomes considerably more useful once you stop asking only, “Who do I need to recognize?” and start asking, “What does Doomsday need me to remember?”
Our Doomsday boss page tracks Doctor Doom, the three-universe collision, the cast, the multiverse rules and every new piece of MCU Diaries coverage as Marvel reveals more.
My read is that Marvel’s watchlist is doing something I call dramatic priming: loading the audience with a relationship, belief, rule, wound or unresolved cost before a later crisis forces that material to matter. A story becomes much more efficient when it establishes what a character values before threatening that value and establishes the rules before somebody has to decide whether those rules are worth breaking.
That matters enormously for Doomsday. Marvel is assembling Avengers, the Fantastic Four, legacy X-Men, Wakandans, Shang-Chi, the New Avengers, Loki and other characters across multiple realities. A movie carrying that much machinery cannot spend its first hour handing everyone an orientation packet.
So the earlier stories can do some of the dramatic labor in advance. Doomsday does not need to invent Xavier and Magneto’s philosophical divide, explain why Steve Rogers is constitutionally incapable of treating innocent life like arithmetic, or teach us from scratch why controlling the multiverse in the name of stability should make Loki deeply uncomfortable. Those positions already exist.
That is why I think this list is considerably more revealing than a normal “previously on Marvel” marathon. Marvel is not merely reloading characters. It is reloading pressure points.
The decision to begin with 2000’s X-Men is one of the clearest clues to what Marvel values in this watchlist. If the goal were simply to remind viewers that Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen once played Professor X and Magneto, later Fox movies could give you more characters, larger action and substantially more mutant continuity.
Instead, Marvel sends us back to the beginning because X-Men establishes the argument underneath Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr. Both men want mutants to survive. Their conflict comes from radically different beliefs about what survival permits them to do.
Xavier believes humans and mutants can eventually coexist, even if the road toward that coexistence is painful and dangerous. Magneto has survived humanity’s capacity for extermination once already and regards waiting for acceptance as a potentially suicidal moral luxury. They share the desire; they disagree about the acceptable cost.
That is why their chess games matter so much. The board turns their relationship into a physical image: two old friends looking at the same pieces, anticipating the same dangers and choosing different strategies.
X2 puts that argument under much greater pressure. William Stryker manipulates Xavier into using Cerebro to kill every mutant mind on Earth. Magneto eventually gains control of the same system and redirects Xavier toward humanity instead.
The weapon does not change. The moral choice does.
Now scale that problem up from two species to entire realities. Disney’s official premise says heroes from three distinct universes will be placed on a deadly collision course. If the survival of one reality begins threatening another, Doomsday suddenly has a cosmic version of the argument Xavier and Magneto have been having since 2000.
Everybody can sincerely want to save existence while arriving at completely different answers about what survival allows them to sacrifice. Xavier can keep searching for a solution that preserves everyone. Magneto can conclude that refusing to choose is simply another way of choosing to let his people die.
Reed Richards can believe intelligence will produce the answer nobody else sees. Steve Rogers can reject any solution that turns innocent lives into numbers. Loki already knows what happens when somebody preserves reality by deciding which lives are allowed to exist.
And Doctor Doom can look at all of them and decide their disagreement is the problem.
That is how you make an enormous cast dramatically readable. You do not need 25 unrelated stories fighting for oxygen if one central crisis forces 25 people to reveal what they actually believe.
The Avengers side of the playlist is just as selective. Marvel gives us Captain America: The First Avenger, The Avengers, Infinity War and Endgame. That creates a very specific progression: sacrifice, assembly, catastrophic defeat and finally the decision to undo that defeat.
The important word there is undo.
Steve Rogers begins his MCU life with a sacrifice. At the end of The First Avenger, he puts the Valkyrie into the ice to save millions of strangers and wakes decades later having lost Peggy Carter and the future he thought he would have with her. The entire emotional cost collapses into one devastatingly ordinary realization: he missed the date.
Endgame eventually gives him a path back to that life. The dance works because The First Avenger made us understand exactly what was taken from him.
That becomes newly uncomfortable when the publicly shown Doomsday footage puts Steve with a child while Victor accuses the heroes of having lived “stolen lives.” Doom’s accusation does not mean Steve’s ending was secretly wrong. It means an antagonist has found a way to reinterpret one of the saga’s happiest endings as evidence for his own case.
And Steve is not the only one.
Infinity War establishes his moral line explicitly when Vision offers to sacrifice himself to destroy the Mind Stone and Steve refuses: “We don’t trade lives.” The movie then spends the rest of its running time attacking that principle from every possible direction.
Wanda ultimately kills Vision anyway. Thanos reverses the sacrifice. Strange surrenders the Time Stone because he has seen a larger outcome nobody else can see. Thor’s personal need to hurt Thanos delays the kill that might have ended the catastrophe.
Then Endgame takes the Avengers’ defining characteristic and turns it into a plan: they refuse to accept the loss.
Five years after the Snap, they discover a way to reach into earlier moments, remove Infinity Stones from history and reverse what Thanos did. Emotionally, we are completely with them because the preceding movie made the loss unbearable. Structurally, however, Marvel also establishes that its heroes will bend reality itself rather than accept certain outcomes as permanent.
That decision produces consequences. Loki escapes with the Tesseract. Gamora enters a future she never originally lived. Another Thanos leaves 2014 and dies years outside his own history. Steve eventually uses the possibility created by the mission to reclaim the ordinary life he originally sacrificed.
Again, the point is not that the Avengers were wrong to save everyone. The point is that Doom now has material to attack.
A great antagonist does not merely hit harder than the protagonist. He creates circumstances that make the protagonist’s existing values increasingly difficult to maintain. Steve saying “we don’t trade lives” is heroic when Vision is standing in a laboratory. It becomes much harder if Doomsday asks whether one entire reality can survive without another paying the price.
That is the pressure Marvel is priming.
The middle of the watchlist performs a more practical job. Loki, No Way Home, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Deadpool & Wolverine have already taught audiences how to understand a reality crisis emotionally, which means Doomsday does not have to turn into a two-hour multiverse PowerPoint.
The terminology can get exhausting: branches, variants, incursions, the TVA, the Void, anchor beings, dying timelines. Underneath all of that lore, however, Marvel has been repeatedly teaching the same dramatic lesson: other realities contain real lives, and changing reality creates costs somewhere.
Loki may be the most important title in this entire section because it turns management of the multiverse into a question about freedom. At the end of Season 1, Loki and Sylvie discover that the stability of the Sacred Timeline has been purchased through extraordinary control. The TVA preserves order by pruning possibilities and erasing lives that threaten the system.
Sylvie refuses that bargain and kills He Who Remains. Season 2 then forces Loki to live inside the consequences of a universe where simply restoring the old system would mean restoring the same moral compromise.
By the finale, Loki takes the dying branches into his own hands and sacrifices his own freedom so everyone else can retain theirs. That gives Doomsday a fascinating character to place opposite Victor because Loki already knows exactly how seductive Doom’s argument could become.
If unlimited realities are colliding and people are dying, control will start sounding practical. Loki is living proof that the method used to create order matters just as much as the order itself.
Spider-Man: No Way Home contributes something more emotional. Peter meets other versions of himself who share his heroic identity while carrying different relationships, regrets and wounds.
Andrew Garfield’s Peter still carries Gwen Stacy’s death, which is why his rescue of MJ lands as more than multiverse fan service. One universe gives him a chance to act differently inside the emotional echo of another.
That lesson matters once Doomsday begins putting entire realities at risk. An incursion has very little dramatic weight if Universe B feels like disposable scenery. No Way Home trains the audience to understand that another universe contains another Peter, another person he loved and another life with its own claim to continue.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness then supplies one of the most important concepts heading toward Doomsday: the incursion. The Illuminati explain that interference between realities can cause universes to collide, while their own Doctor Strange becomes the cautionary example of somebody who attempted to solve one catastrophe by using methods that helped create another.
That mechanism converts “save the universe” from a generic superhero objective into an actual argument. What if two realities are colliding and preserving one threatens the other? Everybody can want survival while disagreeing violently about who carries the obligation to sacrifice.
Steve’s “we don’t trade lives” principle has suddenly reached its largest possible stress test.
Deadpool & Wolverine takes the same machinery and makes it much easier to feel. Wade is not trying to understand the cosmological elegance of the TVA. His home is dying, the people he loves exist inside it, and he refuses to let them disappear.
That emotional sentence is probably more useful to Doomsday than any glossary definition:
My world is dying. I love the people inside it. What am I allowed to do to save them?
Once every major faction can answer that question differently, the multiverse stops being lore and starts becoming drama.
The more recent selections serve another purpose. Shang-Chi, Wakanda Forever, Brave New World, Thunderbolts* and The Fantastic Four: First Steps position characters and factions immediately before the crisis begins.
That sounds less exciting than incursions and alternate universes, but it is essential ensemble work. A crossover becomes dramatically expensive when it has to introduce not only who everyone is, but what everyone currently wants. These movies put the pieces on the board so Doomsday can begin moving them.
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings leaves its hero carrying a power source Marvel deliberately does not fully explain. Wong, Bruce Banner and Carol Danvers examine the Rings and cannot identify their origin, while the post-credits scene reveals that they are transmitting some kind of signal.
We still do not know how important that mystery will become in Doomsday, and I would not pretend the watchlist proves the answer. What the selection does tell us is that Marvel wants Shang-Chi and the Ten Rings close enough to the audience’s memory that the movie does not have to rebuild him from zero.
Wakanda Forever is more obviously useful at the level of worldview. Wakanda and Talokan are civilizations shaped by the fear that exposure will allow outsiders to exploit or destroy what they have protected.
Shuri and Namor respond differently to that danger. Their eventual agreement prevents mutual destruction without magically erasing the distrust underneath it.
That makes both worlds ready-made participants in an existential crisis. They already know what it means to believe the survival of their people may depend on distrusting everyone outside their borders. Doomsday simply has to make the threatened border an entire universe.
Captain America: Brave New World gets more revealing when you compare it with what Marvel leaves off the list. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier contains the fuller story of Sam Wilson deciding what the shield means and whether he is willing to carry it.
Brave New World gives us Sam after that decision.
That is exactly what a giant crossover needs. Doomsday is less interested in replaying how Sam became Captain America than in testing what Captain America does when the crisis becomes impossible.
Thunderbolts* performs a similar bit of setup with Yelena, Bucky, Red Guardian, Ghost, John Walker and Bob. By the end of that story, Valentina publicly brands the group as the New Avengers.
That means Doomsday does not need to manufacture uncertainty around the Avengers identity. It arrives with that disagreement already loaded.
Sam Wilson carries one idea of what Captain America and the Avengers should represent. Bucky carries direct history with Steve and the original team. John Walker’s entire identity has been shaped by his complicated relationship with the same symbols, while Yelena has learned to value the deeply imperfect people who actually choose to stand beside one another.
Those are starting positions. The crisis gets to test them.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps may be the most important present-tense setup on the entire list because it gives Victor von Doom what every giant crossover villain desperately needs: personal access to the people opposing him.
The publicly shown Doomsday footage deepens that connection. Sue remembers Victor as someone who was once kind and caring before catastrophic loss broke him, while Reed confronts Victor directly as the scale of the disaster becomes clear. :contentReference[oaicite:2]{index=2}
That relationship gives Doom something raw power cannot manufacture. Marvel can always create a larger army or tear another hole in the sky. Reed demanding answers from a man he knows creates immediate dramatic pressure because the conflict is no longer merely Avengers versus Villain.
Doom belongs to somebody’s history.
And his history appears to revolve around loss.
That matters because Marvel’s heroes have repeatedly responded to loss by finding extraordinary ways to reclaim pieces of the lives taken from them. Steve gets Peggy. Thor has Love. Loki survives his original fate and finds another purpose. Peter repeatedly tries to preserve the relationships slipping away from him.
Victor can look at those lives and call them stolen.
The omissions are where this watchlist becomes genuinely interesting. A curated list only becomes evidence when plausible alternatives are left behind, and Disney skips several projects that would make perfect sense in a generic MCU continuity refresher.
I would not turn those omissions into plot confirmation. Streaming playlists are marketing tools, not leaked screenplays. But they can still tell us which memories Marvel currently considers most useful to have near the surface.
X-Men: Days of Future Past looks almost comically appropriate for a multiverse Avengers movie. It deals with altered history, restored lives, Xavier, Magneto and an existential mutant crisis.
Yet Marvel chooses X-Men and X2 instead.
That makes me think the important thing being refreshed is less the Fox franchise’s time-travel mechanics and more the original Xavier/Magneto relationship. Marvel has newer stories capable of teaching the audience about branches and alternate realities. What those first two X-Men movies uniquely provide is the memory of two men who love many of the same people and still reach opposite conclusions about what survival requires.
Captain America: Civil War might be the strangest Avengers omission because it is the MCU’s definitive movie about heroes dividing over a moral disagreement. If all Doomsday needed was “remember that Avengers can fight each other,” this would be mandatory.
Instead, the playlist preserves a different progression: the Avengers assemble, the Avengers fail and the Avengers refuse to accept that failure as permanent.
That keeps the attention on consequence rather than regulation. Doomsday does not necessarily need to reopen the Sokovia Accords. Doom has a much sharper argument available if he can ask what the rest of reality paid while the Avengers celebrated getting everyone back.
The absence of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier reinforces the same present-tense logic we see elsewhere. Disney could assign Sam’s complete transition into Captain America, but instead it chooses the movie where he has already accepted the role.
That suggests the important dramatic information is not how Sam became Captain America. It is who Sam is as Captain America when the collision begins.
The Marvels may be the most obvious continuity omission because Monica Rambeau ends the film stranded in another reality and encounters Beast. That sounds tailor-made for a movie involving legacy X-Men characters and colliding universes.
Its absence is therefore worth noticing without overreading it. Marvel may believe Monica’s position can be explained quickly, may not consider it central to the primary dramatic engine, or may simply be prioritizing other material in this particular countdown.
What we should not do is treat the omission as proof that the thread does not matter. The playlist is useful evidence about emphasis, not a contractual promise about the screenplay.
And then we reach the omission I find most interesting: there is no solo Iron Man movie on the list.
Robert Downey Jr. is playing Victor von Doom. Every person who has followed the MCU for any meaningful amount of time will carry Tony Stark into the theater simply because they are looking at Robert Downey Jr.’s face.
Marvel does not need to refresh that recognition.
Instead, the playlist gives us Tony primarily through the Avengers movies while First Steps and the newer Doomsday footage build Victor through his own relationships, wounds and history. That distinction matters because Doom cannot survive as a character if his entire dramatic function is “evil Tony Stark.”
The casting becomes useful when familiarity creates pressure rather than identity. Steve and Thor can look at Victor and experience the emotional dissonance of Tony’s face while Reed and Sue know the man standing underneath it as Victor von Doom.
Our full argument: Doom works best if Marvel uses our memory of Tony Stark as a mirror rather than turning Victor into another Tony variant.
If you can watch all 15 entries, the full list gives you the broadest preparation. If your time is limited, however, I would prioritize the stories that do the most work for the central collision rather than simply trying to recognize every returning character.
That is not a claim that the remaining projects are irrelevant. It is the shortest route through what I think the watchlist is primarily building: survival, sacrifice, multiverse consequence and Doom’s personal access to the people who will oppose him.
This watchlist is only one part of the larger Road to Doomsday. Our latest explainers, podcasts and project analysis assigned directly to Avengers: Doomsday will update below automatically as we publish them.
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That brings us back to the question we started with: why these 15? The first two selections give us Xavier and Magneto sitting across a metaphorical chessboard, trying to protect the same people while disagreeing about what survival permits. By the time we reach the other end of the list, Marvel has expanded that pressure through Steve’s refusal to trade lives, the Avengers’ refusal to accept loss, Loki’s defense of free choice, the reality-destroying danger of incursions and Reed’s personal history with Victor.
That is the arc of dramatic priming. Marvel is loading the audience with beliefs, relationships and costs before Doomsday takes those familiar positions and makes the choice much harder. The transferable craft lesson goes well beyond superheroes: the bigger your climax becomes, the more important it is to establish what your characters value before the crisis asks them to sacrifice it.
Marvel has already set the board. Doom just has to force the move.
