The MCU has released multiple films, TV shows, and online series that featured different superheroes, as well as those who will be taking over the main Avengers. And due to the plethora of content that Marvel Studios has provided, fans are wondering which year has the most MCU runtime.
Over on r/MarvelStudios, three Redditors shared graphs with different results. The information logged down was the total amount of hours of MCU content released between 2008-2021/22. All three charts have different interpretations of the data as some decide not to include the year 2022. Do the TV and streaming Marvel shows outside Disney Plus count? Or to include predicted run times for upcoming MCU films such as Thor: Love and Thunder and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
A common trend noticed in all three graphs is that both 2009 and 2020 did not release any Marvel films at all. However, 2020 made up for its missing content with Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season 7. Also, the runtime hours began to spike up from 2013 as it was the year when Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was broadcast for the first time. And it remained stagnant until 2018 when it spiked up once more because of newer Marvel streaming content.
It’s also interesting to note that after 2020, no Marvel content was released on TV and other streaming services asides from Disney Plus. It is also important to take note that despite the large number of hours seen in the graph, with hours peaked between 36-84 hours between 2018-2021 thanks to streaming content, movie hours remained the same. Films lasted between 2-3 hours each, with 2021 having the most total movie hour runtime of 9 hours and 30 mins.
While accessibility to rewatch older Marvel content is becoming slightly difficult due to the amount of content, at least Phase 4 of the MCU tries to do quick recaps of the events in previous films so it’s easier for newer viewers to engage with the content. And with the Netflix Marvel era being canon in the MCU thanks to a new Instagram post made by Disney, fans now have a lot of backtracking to do in order to catch up. Or maybe Marvel will release a quick recap in their newer content for fans to quickly catch up.
