Best MCU Movies
Settle it: two at a time →The best MCU movies are ranked here across the Infinity Saga and beyond, from the 2008 Iron Man that started everything to Spider-Man: No Way Home in 2021. Entries qualify on filmmaking that holds up outside the continuity as much as on scale: a coherent point of view, a director whose voice survives the house style, and set pieces worth rewatching. The films at the top do both jobs at once, working as standalone features while carrying the weight of everything assembled around them.
Ranked by 1 person · 15 items
How the opening order was chosen
The opening order is the order I added the items in. Every ballot moves the ranking from there.
A reasonable order rewards films that work without homework first, then credits how much the continuity paid off. That trade-off is where the top gets contentious: Endgame and Infinity War draw enormous power from eleven years of setup and comparatively little from their own scripts, while Winter Soldier, Black Panther and Ragnarok would hold up with the serial numbers filed off.
Avengers: Infinity War is first on the one ballot cast so far.
Global Ranking
Reaching $1 billion in 11 days, faster than any film before it, the 2018 crossover ended at $2.048 billion off a record $257.7 million domestic opening. Its closing image, half the cast dissolving after Thanos wins outright, was a risk no tentpole that size had taken.
Endgame passed Avatar in July 2019 to become the highest-grossing film ever at $2.79 billion, a position it held until Avatar's 2021 rerelease reclaimed it. Its $357 million domestic opening broke the record set a year earlier by Infinity War, and the three-hour runtime spends itself paying off eleven years of setup.
Anthony and Joe Russo turned their 2014 sequel into a paranoid political thriller, casting Robert Redford as the S.H.I.E.L.D. elder who turns out to be HYDRA. That reveal dissolved the agency the MCU had been built around since 2008 and sent Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. pivoting mid-season.
Jon Favreau's 2008 launch of the whole enterprise grossed $585 million against a $140 million budget and took Oscar nominations for visual effects and sound editing. Robert Downey Jr.'s improvisation set the house voice, and the Nick Fury tag after the credits promised a shared universe that did not exist yet.
James Gunn's 2014 bet on third-tier characters, a talking raccoon and a tree with a one-line vocabulary, worked well enough that Awesome Mix Vol. 1 became the first soundtrack of entirely pre-existing songs to top the Billboard 200. It also confirmed Marvel could open a film with no Avenger in it.
Taika Waititi rebuilt the Thor films as color-saturated comedy in 2017, closing on $854 million worldwide. Cate Blanchett's Hela crushes Mjolnir in her first scene, and Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" scores both of the film's biggest fights.
The first superhero film nominated for Best Picture, it drew seven nominations at the 2019 Oscars and won three: score, costume design, production design. Ryan Coogler's Wakanda grossed $1.35 billion, and Killmonger arrives with a grievance the film refuses to dismiss.
No pandemic-era release had reached $1 billion until this one did, and it finished above $1.9 billion after a $260 million domestic opening. Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield return alongside five villains pulled from the earlier Sony franchises, Alfred Molina's Doc Ock and Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin among them.
Opening to a then-record $207.4 million domestically in 2012, Joss Whedon's crossover became the third film ever to pass $1.5 billion worldwide. Proving that heroes from four separate franchises could share one movie is the structural bet the rest of the MCU was built on.
Captain America: Civil War was 2016's highest-grossing film at $1.153 billion, and it works as an Avengers sequel in everything but title. It introduced Tom Holland's Spider-Man and Chadwick Boseman's Black Panther, and the ending splits Rogers and Stark over Bucky rather than the Accords.
Folding Manhattan like paper and closing on a hero who wins by boring his enemy into surrender buys the film real distinction, but the skeleton underneath is Iron Man's origin reused nearly beat for beat, arrogant genius, career-ending injury, humbler man.
The Rocket flashbacks are the cruelest material Marvel has put in a movie, and the High Evolutionary earns them as a villain granted no charm to hide behind. Gunn closes his trilogy with more control than the first Guardians of the Galaxy opened it, even if the Counter-Earth stretch wanders while the cages are where the film actually lives.
A Shane Black movie wearing franchise clothes: Christmas setting, buddy banter, Tony Stark out of the armor for most of the film and better for it. The Trevor Slattery reversal threw away the franchise's most marketable villain for a joke, and plenty of viewers never forgave it. Whether that trade was cowardice or the wittiest thing Marvel ever did is the whole argument.
The bus fight and the scaffolding sequence are staged like the Hong Kong pictures the film is honoring, legible, escalating, carried by bodies rather than particles. Then the finale swaps Tony Leung's wounded patriarch for a computer-generated dragon fight, and the most human villain the franchise ever cast is swallowed by the spectacle. Half a great movie, and the right half.
A high-school comedy that happens to contain Spider-Man, with Michael Keaton playing the Vulture as a contractor squeezed out of the cleanup economy the Avengers left behind. The drive to the dance does more with silence than the ferry sequence does with effects. The actual web-slinging is the thinnest of any Spider-Man film, and the movie barely seems to mind.
