For the last decade, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been mapping out its own increasingly elaborate built-in history, and to help you in understanding how these interconnected events all slot together, we now have an official timeline of the years in which each flick takes place.
The chronology comes to us via the new book Marvel Studios: The First 10 Years, which breaks down the saga as follows:
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1943-1945: Captain America: The First Avenger
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2010: Iron Man
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2011: Iron Man 2, Thor
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2012: The Avengers, Iron Man 3
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2013: Thor: The Dark World
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2014: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
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2015: Avengers: Age of Ultron, Ant-Man
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2016: Captain America: Civil War, Spider-Man: Homecoming
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2016 through to 2017: Doctor Strange
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2017: Black Panther, Thor: Ragnarok, Avengers: Infinity War
While most of these movies take place on or close to their year of release, some entries may still come as a surprise. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, for instance, is said to pretty much pick up where the first film left off in 2014, creating a three-year gap between the 2017 sequel and the gang’s return in Avengers: Infinity War. Meanwhile, the 2008 Iron Man has been placed in 2010, easing the gap between this MCU-founding entry and the eventual crossover moment of 2012’s The Avengers.
The two conspicuously absent entries, meanwhile, are the barely-canon The Incredible Hulk and the recent Ant-Man and the Wasp. Interestingly, Scott Lang’s latest outing arguably puts this whole timeline into disarray, seeing how it’s said to take place two years after the 2016 events of Captain America: Civil War, and yet its mid-credits sequence coincides with the 2017 ‘snap’ of Infinity War.
Perhaps that’s an issue for Marvel Studios to explain further down the line, but in the meantime, the MCU has some future releases coming up that should take us beyond the 2010s stretch that previous entries have been mostly confined to.
Firstly, Captain Marvel is headed our way on March 8th, 2019, and is expected to take us back to 1995. After that, Avengers 4 hits theaters on May 3rd, and if the speculation is anything to go by, this movie could be jumping all around the timeline, both in the future and the past. And with ancient tales like The Eternals on the way, it looks like the MCU history book will be undergoing a considerable expansion in the years to come.
