What should you watch before Avengers: Endgame? This is an easy question with a complicated answer.
I would argue, on the one hand, that you should watch everything from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to get the full experience. You’re going to be so hopelessly lost about certain characters, plot developments, and, heck, minor background details, that you’ll end up in a theater full of people chuckling and nodding their heads and crying and you’ll have no earthly idea what any of them are responding to.
It’s also sort of impossible at this point to recommend just a few of these movies, since there are so many characters, and each of them has his or her own story threads to navigate. For example, you might want to know everything there is to know about Thor. Well, that’s the three Thor films at minimum, along with the other movies he appears in (which if you include cameos, means eight movies in total). And that’s one character out of dozens.
Of course, you could read a cheat sheet to get caught up. A year ago at this time, I wrote a significant amount of word salad trying to catch folks up on all of main plot beats and characters of the MCU in advance of Avengers: Infinity War. If you’ve missed some (most? all?) of the movies along the way, or if you’ve just forgotten some of the details, it’s still a decent guide. You can read it here.
But really, where I ended up, after all of that, was to recommend a short refresher to anyone who was at all already familiar with the series. For Infinity War, I recommended watching Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain America: Civil War, and Thor: Ragnarok to make sure you were caught up (I stand by that recommendation.).
I feel like an abbreviated refresher this time around is good too. I mean, if you’re new, watch ALL the movies or read a guide like the one I linked to above. If you’ve been around for awhile, however, picking and choosing just some of the movies to revisit should suffice.
But which ones should you pick?
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