WATCHING 38 MOVIES sounds daunting, but it’s really not that bad. At the onset of 2021, a rewatch of the feature films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — from 2008’s Iron Man to 2019’s Spider-Man: Far From Home — eventually led to screening 2021’s Black Widow in a theater, followed by Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Eternals, and Spider-Man: No Way Home all on the big screen. These are fun movies that often get at and invoke deeper themes; they’re action-packed with tons of levity and introduce characters you’ll love down the line, even if you don’t care for them initially.
But back to that main point — watching everything. Obviously a 25-plus project or list of anything is a lot to take on, and it sure sounds like it too. But breezing through a rewatch (or a first watch) of the MCU is really not all that much when you think about it in the context of the way we now watch and binge TV. 38 movies in the range of 2 to 3 hours each comes out to the equivalent of somewhere around five or six seasons of a prestige drama. It’s a lot, but a far cry from insurmountable.
Memories are fickle, people change, opinions change, and things take on new contexts. Rewatching movies with the privilege of hindsight can often be rewarding, and this is especially the case when watching through the MCU’s three existing phases.
Through the years, Kevin Feige and the MCU team have done a really great job of building out what almost feels like a house brand or formula; they know what makes a good movie, and what fans of the genre and the characters tend to like. Which makes it difficult, really, to rank one of these movies ahead of another. That’s why for this particular exercise the movies are ranked in tiers. Essentially, that means that among each given tier, the movies are more or less interchangeable. Obviously, a decision had to be made among those tiers to put one movie in front of another, and those decisions are what they are. But the films within each tier are so close they can be basically swapped in and out to your liking.
The movies below are ranked from worst to best, and as a bonus each movie includes a descriptor of just how much MCU knowledge you need to really appreciate everything that’s going on. Most of these movies aren’t bad. Okay, Captain America: Brave New World is pretty bad, and a few others are too. But even the ones on the lower end of the list are fun enough and have their moments — and occasionally serve to develop characters who wind up paying off in the long run.
The ‘Honestly, Not Great’ Tier
38. Captain America: Brave New World (2025)
Some of Marvel’s best work has come from diving into specific genres. Captain America: The Winter Soldier notably took influence from political thrillers like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor — and was a great movie as a result, playing those beats perfectly and never wavering from that, despite at the end of the day still being a Marvel movie and a single chapter in a larger overarching story. Captain America: Brave New World wants to take that same political thriller cue, but never quite pulls it off. Anthony Mackie (as Sam Wilson, now with the Captain America title), Danny Ramirez (now the Falcon), and Harrison Ford (taking over as “Thunderbolt” Ross for the late William Hurt) are all trying their very best, but can only do so much when they’re so consistently let down by a shoddy script filled with poor plotting and clunky, constantly expository dialogue. For a political/conspiracy thriller to work, you need tension; people need to be wondering what’s going to happen next, who could possibly be responsible, and how it could have happened. But Brave New World was so lacking in confidence that it gave almost all of those things away before the movie even started, with major plot points used in marketing in an attempt to get people through the door. According to reports, the film was probably doomed from the start, and the marketing approach certainly didn’t help.
MCU understanding needed? Yes. You need to know how Sam Wilson became Captain America, his relationship with Steve Rogers, the Avengers — and also, inconveniently, a decent chunk of things from The Incredible Hulk and Eternals.
37. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)
The third Ant-Man film sent Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and his family into the Quantum Realm, where they encountered Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors) in what was intended to be a franchise-launching villain introduction. The ambition was clear, but the execution fell flat — the film leaned too heavily on CGI-heavy world-building at the expense of the grounded, heist-movie charm that made the first two Ant-Man films enjoyable. Majors delivered a compelling performance, but the script gave him and the rest of the cast little to work with, resulting in a movie that felt more like an obligation than an adventure.
MCU understanding needed? A working knowledge of the previous Ant-Man films and the events of Avengers: Endgame helps considerably, as Scott’s post-Blip celebrity status and his relationship with Cassie are central to the story.
No MCU ranking is ever truly final — new films keep arriving, and perspectives keep shifting with each rewatch. But taken together, these 38 movies represent one of the most ambitious storytelling experiments in Hollywood history, and even the weakest entries are part of a larger tapestry that, at its best, is genuinely thrilling to experience.
