Wait, How Many Shows and Movies Do You Have to Watch to Understand ‘Avengers: Doomsday’?

I love a movie event as much as the next person, but I usually like to walk in cold and just watch what the filmmaker has to offer.

With Marvel, there's a little more legwork involved.

They have so many features and TV shows, that to be a completist would take a lot of time.

Still, Marvel is not scared of an event title. In fact, they have everyone on the edge of their seats for the return of Robert Downey Jr. in Avengers: Doomsday, which promises to be their dramatic follow-up to Endgame, and their biggest release to date.

Recently, an X account called Marvel Updates released a list of all the movies and TV shows you need to watch to really understand Doomsday... and it was extensive.

The post featured:

• • ‘X-Men’
• ‘X-Men 2’
• X-Men: The Last Stand’
• ‘Shang-Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings’
• ‘Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness’
• ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’
• ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’
• ‘Loki’ S1 & S2
• ‘The Marvels’
• ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’
• ‘Captain America: Brave New World’
• ‘Thunderbolts*’
• ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’

In case you were wondering, to watch all of those would take about 35 hours, or roughly 2,100 minutes. This includes standard theatrical runtimes for the movies, plus around 600 minutes for TV. Exact times may vary slightly due to versions or credits.

A marathon of all of these would likely span 5-6 days with breaks for rest, assuming 6-8 hour daily sessions.

That's so much time to spend watching to truly "get" one movie.

Now, I don't think you HAVE TO watch all this stuff to enjoy these movies, but I do think you will need at least some explanation from Marvel as to who these characters in Doomsday are and why they're relevant or what their arcs will be. And to have that, you kind of DO have to watch all this stuff to extrapolate the context of who's in this, why, and to find the motivations for their actions.

I am worried about these expanded universes and the burden they place on viewers. I want to be able to casually walk into the biggest movies, and I would probably avoid theaters if I thought I wouldn't have a good experience walking into something without doing the homework, sort of like how I used to skip days in high school when I didn't, too.

Marvel is gambling a little bit with assigning all this stuff, or at least having their fan accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers tweet it out unchecked. I want these big movies to make big money, because I think that's generally good for Hollywood, but I also think we're asking too much of the audience.

There has to be a happy medium between extended universes and the need to see a bunch of stuff before you walk into a big new movie.

Let me know what you think in the comments.