To fully get up to speed before the release of Avengers: Endgame, Marvel newbies would need to work through all 21 movies in the series. With an average run-time of around 120 minutes, that's 40+ hours of superhero flicks in just 16 days.
Technically achievable, sure, but inadvisable. Luckily, the Russo brothers, the directing duo behind the Avengers series, think that a colossal movie marathon would be pretty pointless. In fact, they believe that newcomers only really need to watch four films to prepare themselves for the final entry: Winter Soldier, Civil War, Thor Ragnorak and Infinity War.
Speaking to Fandango, Anthony Russo spoke of how each instalment in the series brought in new fans who weren’t necessarily versed in Marvel movie lore, and that he created the movies with that in mind.
“I think you see this movie after movie, the audience keeps growing for these films. So what that tells us is that people are seeing these movies who haven’t seen the previous ones. So it’s important that we are speaking to an audience that is perhaps seeing these stories for the first time.
“That being said, there’s certainly an interconnected story being told. I would say, certainly, Civil War and Infinity War are probably the two biggest lead-ins to this movie, in the sense that Civil War created the situation where the Avengers were divided.”
"The relationship between Tony Stark and Steve Rogers was severed, and that was what put them in a vulnerable place when Thanos came in Infinity War.
"I think that is what partially what led to their demise in that film, the fact that they were divided when the greatest threat they ever faced came to them. So there is definitely a throughline there."
Winter Soldier was the Russo brothers’ first film in the series, and it was the movie that set Captain America on a path of emotional development.
Anthony Russo said: "I mean, my brother and I, of course, are very focused on story starting from Winter Soldier, because that's where we entered the MCU.
"So for us, in our brains, on a storytelling level, we were threading a narrative from there.
"Certainly, I would also say that the previous Avengers movies also very much factor into this film."
As for Ragnorak – it helps a lot with understanding crucial bits of chronology, but more than anything, it's just really, really funny.
