I'm out of my Goddamn mind. You're welcome.

May 29, 2020 4:55 PM

Tony Goldmark has spent his quarantine time compiling a key archive of the ages: I figured out the precise chronological order of all the MCU movies (so far) BY SCENE. Start with the first three minutes and forty-five seconds of Thor: The Dark World, then switch over to 1:19:43-1:19:54 of Thor: Ragnarok, and a hundred and sixteen steps later (thanks to Goldmark going back to separate some of the time heist scenes), with all of Spider-Man: Far From Home, you will have Uatu'd the 23 MCU movies, hopping across all of reality to get the story in one kind-of-continuous narrative.
posted by Etrigan (29 comments total)

Woah. I don’t even know what to say except that I want a supercut.
posted by bq at 5:19 PM on May 29, 2020 [11 favorites]

now do the TV shows! my husband and I need a new binge agenda
posted by Jacqueline at 5:35 PM on May 29, 2020

I might actually watch a supercut of all of this into one giant thing if it were done. What is that? 50 hours in a row?

Counting credits, the total run time is 49 hours and 56 minutes.
posted by Etrigan at 5:44 PM on May 29, 2020 [5 favorites]

>now do the TV shows! my husband and I need a new binge agenda

ooo Season 5 of Agents of SHIELD is going to get you into some freaky-Deke-y.
posted by Catblack at 5:45 PM on May 29, 2020 [8 favorites]

I might actually watch a supercut of all of this into one giant thing if it were done. What is that? 50 hours in a row?

A few years ago, someone edited together a strictly chronological supercut and it ended up on torrent trackers. It was pretty long but not nearly as long as it would have to be now.
posted by BungaDunga at 5:52 PM on May 29, 2020 [1 favorite]

You get two bathroom breaks, if you move quick enough.
posted by Etrigan at 5:59 PM on May 29, 2020 [5 favorites]

I remember watching Spider-Man: Homecoming and thinking it's gonna be fun to see the supercut of Peter's home-video with the concurrent scenes from Civil War. But this is taking it quite a bit farther.
posted by straight at 6:00 PM on May 29, 2020

total run time is 49 hours and 56 minutes

Self-Catheterization for anatomic Males and Females.
posted by meehawl at 7:31 PM on May 29, 2020 [2 favorites]

Oh wait, that's X Men. Nevermind.

Isn't Wanda/Scarlet Witch Magneto's daughter?
posted by warriorqueen at 7:32 PM on May 29, 2020

So about a decade ago I realized that I knew absolutely nothing about the X-Men, and I had (well, still have) friends that like to talk about them from time to time. Whenever the subject came up, I was completely lost. I decided I should probably learn something about the X-Men.

I turns out that someone had set up a series of torrents of X-Men comics (and associated titles) arranged chronologically. I'm not a big comic reader, but I have been working through them slowly since then. I have made it from the beginning to 1990 ( I am currently reading the "Acts of Vengeance" crossover).

After a decade, I am midway through the fifth torrent in the series. The total number of torrents now number at least sixty-seven.
posted by Quonab at 7:34 PM on May 29, 2020 [5 favorites]

I temporarily had an idea like this when I started thinking about the best way to re-watch Star Trek, but I chickened out of the idea pretty immediately.
posted by ckape at 7:42 PM on May 29, 2020

Isn't Wanda/Scarlet Witch Magneto's daughter?

Not in the MCU. While Fox and Disney/Marvel have since merged, at the time the characters were introduced, they were in a weird legal limbo because Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are in both the Avengers and in the X-Men. But, other than those two specific characters, Marvel was contractually forbidden from making movies about the X-Men, which were owned by Fox. Because of that contract, Marvel was forbidden from mentioning Magneto, any other character associated with the X-Men franchise, or even using the word 'mutant'* in any movie they created.

Thus, in the MCU, the twins' father is a random Eastern European guy. Simultaneously, they (different actors) are Magneto's kids over in the Fox X-Men movies, which are contractually prevented from mentioning the Avengers or associated characters.

_{*Hence the 'Inhumans'}
posted by Hatashran at 7:46 PM on May 29, 2020 [3 favorites]

I was really hoping that one of the side-effects of Endgame would have been the merger of the Fox Marvel characters into the MCU, and with WandaVision seeming to promise Wanda's reality-warping abilities to be maxed out, it's not out of the realm of possibility for Evan Peters' Quicksilver--the X-character whom I most want to see rolled into the MCU--to just show up one day.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:02 PM on May 29, 2020 [2 favorites]

I just assumed someone* would get the Continuity Stone and make the integration of X-Men and the MCU happen.

*Deadpool.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:13 PM on May 29, 2020 [12 favorites]

I was hoping Bob Newhart would wake up and we'd all have been characters in one of his dreams.
posted by not_on_display at 8:25 PM on May 29, 2020 [8 favorites]

Ok, I have to share that Squirrel Girl’s powers are specifically attributed to teratogenic exposure which makes her Not A Mutant For All Licensing Agreement purposes.
posted by bq at 8:53 PM on May 29, 2020 [8 favorites]

The amount I am impressed by this is rivaled only by how much I would not want to watch these scenes in this order!
posted by ejs at 8:57 PM on May 29, 2020 [1 favorite]

I was really hoping that one of the side-effects of Endgame would have been the merger of the Fox Marvel characters into the MCU

I had also been hoping for "Reverse-Decimation", where Wanda magics mutants into existence. Next movie, Wolverine has just always been there...
posted by mikelieman at 1:00 AM on May 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

I would like him to show his work.

Not for him to justify or explain. I am genuinely curious how he did this. Did he use any software tools? Post it notes? Notebook and pencil? How much did he rely on his own memory of these movies and how often did he have to re-watch the source? How long did this take?
posted by like_neon at 1:33 AM on May 30, 2020 [2 favorites]

This was my fervent hope for LOST and maybe someone did splice it together in chronological order but if so, I never heard about it. I just figured the ending pissed off anyone who was so inclined.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 7:03 AM on May 30, 2020

I was really hoping that one of the side-effects of Endgame would have been the merger of the Fox Marvel characters into the MCU, and with WandaVision seeming to promise Wanda's reality-warping abilities to be maxed out, it's not out of the realm of possibility for Evan Peters' Quicksilver--the X-character whom I most want to see rolled into the MCU--to just show up one day.

The next Dr. Strange movie is called “in the Multiverse of Madness”, so there’s still hope.
posted by Fleebnork at 7:46 AM on May 30, 2020 [3 favorites]

I saw this on twitter and discussion of it is how I learned the there wasn’t an Easter egg of Dr Strange turning down Rhodey’s case just before his crash. I’d assumed the Air Force colonel with a crushed spine was War Machine’s crash in CA:CW.
posted by rmd1023 at 12:05 PM on May 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

OMG hippy bear! And he posted it all on a Facebook page! Which is where I’ll be for the foreseeable future.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 7:08 PM on May 30, 2020

One caveat is that we have no idea how old Gamora is (whether she ages at the same rate as humans), so we have to take a wild guess at when the flashbacks of her as a child with Thanos take place.
posted by straight at 7:42 PM on May 30, 2020

> TWinbrook8: "This was my fervent hope for LOST and maybe someone did splice it together in chronological order but if so, I never heard about it."

I had a much more limited idea: diagramming out how all the various characters' paths intersected in the flash-sideways universe in the final season. I gave up after barely two episodes. I cannot imagine the fortitude required to do the entire Lost series or all the existing MCU movies.
posted by mhum at 9:44 AM on June 1, 2020

In my news feed a headline popped up that Prof. X. had been psychically shielding the existence of mutants this whole time. I'm guessing that's a fan theory but it would be an easy way to integrate them into the MCU. Hell maybe they were in the background helping out in a lot of the events from the movies but no one remembers it.

Quonab I don't think you need to read all of the issues. Once you're up to a year or so after Age of Apocalypse, skip to Grant Morrison's run. Then you can go to Joss Whedon's run on Astonishing X-Men, then House of M and skip everything after that until House of X/Powers of X and then you're current. At that point if you're wondering who Doop or Hope are or how Jean Grey is alive you can look up the relevant issues but my god reading everything X-related from the 90's onwards feels like so much more pain than its worth. I should know as I read a good chunk of them when they came out or a bit after.

With the X-characters in particular I feel that they get re-invented and re-interpreted fairly dramatically so there isn't any additional context gained by knowing about their many deaths and rebirths. Like Prof. X.'s most recent return via taking over Fantomex's body. For right now it is totally irrelevant and if it ever does tie into future events they'll explain enough of it in-story to keep you current.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 3:33 PM on June 1, 2020

I'm glad someone did it for Arrested Development's final season. It still sucked, but I am glad someone put the time and effort in to show me that the story still sucked when told in a linear fashion.
posted by not_on_display at 3:42 PM on June 1, 2020 [1 favorite]

This was my fervent hope for LOST and maybe someone did splice it together in chronological order but if so, I never heard about it.

Done and done. I didn't do it, I just googled.

I did do it. It was not worth it.
posted by Molesome at 8:03 AM on June 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

So somebody did make a supercut of the MCU timeline.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 6:52 PM on June 18, 2020