About

Most Marvel watch orders are a single flat list, release order or chronological order, which forces a rigid sequence even where the stories don’t actually depend on each other. This app takes the other approach: the catalog is a directed graph of story dependencies, and the “suggested order” you see is a topological sort of that graph. To watch any one title, you only need the titles that point into it.

Where the graph comes from

The dependency data is adapted from A smarter MCU watch order (ver. 003, March 2026), a community-made chart by Rocked03 posted on r/marvelstudios:

https://www.reddit.com/r/marvelstudios/s/Yc9CunxbWr

All credit for the ordering and the arrow-by-arrow judgement calls goes to its author. This project only transcribes that chart into machine-readable form so it can be walked programmatically. Quoting the chart’s own disclaimer: “the labels are subjective… the lines between the levels are blurry, and the importance of a story will vary between opinions. This exists to help you navigate the MCU, but it’s not the rules.” Titles and story-dependency edges are a best-effort transcription of the chart. The chart's own disclaimer applies: the labels are subjective and the lines between levels are blurry. Corrections are welcome - edit this one file and open a PR.

The three kinds of arrow

Each dependency carries a strength, straight from the chart’s legend. You choose how strict to be, and the order and the “what’s missing” lists both respond to that choice.

• Must watch62 edges

  Only hard story dependencies. The shortest path through the MCU.

• Should watch45 edges

  Hard dependencies plus context a title recaps but assumes.

• Could watch45 edges

  Everything, including passing references. The completionist path.

Dashed arrows on the original chart are predictions based on pre-release knowledge; they are flagged as predicted here and appear on unreleased titles.

Languages

The interface is available in 14 languages, including right-to-left layouts for Arabic and Persian. Your browser’s preferred language is used on a first visit; after that, whatever you pick in the language menu is remembered, and the language is part of the URL so a link you share opens in the language you shared it in.

The interface is translated, and so are the detailed summaries, which are this site’s own prose. Title names are not, and never will be: they are identifiers, and a machine-translated film title helps nobody find the film. The short synopsis in the page header comes from TMDB in your language wherever a contributor has written one, and falls back to English where nobody has. Adding a language is one JSON file in src/i18n/dictionaries/; there is a guide in docs/internationalisation.md.

• English
• Español
• Português (Brasil)
• Français
• Deutsch
• Italiano
• Türkçe
• Русский
• हिन्दी
• 简体中文
• 日本語
• 한국어
• العربية
• فارسی

Posters, IMDb and streaming links

Every title links to IMDb, directly where we hold a verified id, and to an IMDb search otherwise, so the link always lands somewhere useful. Artwork, however, does not come from IMDb: it publishes no image API and its posters may not be hotlinked. Posters come from TMDB, whose free API permits this use and also exposes each title’s IMDb id. When no TMDB key is configured, the app draws its own poster art from the title’s data, and the colour tells you which phase it belongs to.

Streaming rights are regional and change constantly, so the platform chips are a hint rather than a promise. The Where to watch link on every title resolves availability for your country, and is the answer to trust.

Detailed summaries, and spoilers

A watch order is only useful if you are allowed to skip things. So every released title carries a detailed summary: what actually happens, ending included, written so you can miss the title entirely and still follow the ones that depend on it. 97 are written so far; the rest are either not out yet or waiting for someone who has actually watched them.

It is never shown unless you ask. The short, spoiler-free synopsis stays in the header where it always was; the detailed one sits below it behind a button, and its text is not in the page at all until you press it: no blur to read through and nothing for a screen reader to stumble into. If you would rather always see them, there is a checkbox next to the button, remembered in your browser under marvel-watchlist:spoilers:v1 and reversible from the same spot. Titles that have not come out yet have no summary, by design.

The summaries are original prose written for this project and live in data/summaries/, one file per language. English is the base, and each of the other 13 languages now has a complete translation of it, awaiting review by a second speaker. A title a translation has not reached falls back to the English text for that title alone, labelled so you know what you are reading. Corrections and translations are welcome: edit one file and run npm run summaries:validate.

Your watchlist

Everything you tick off is stored in your browser’s localStorage under the key marvel-watchlist:v1. There is no account, no server call and no tracking. The storage layer sits behind a small adapter interface, so a logged-in, database-backed watchlist can replace it without touching the UI. See the README for that path. You can export and import your list at any time.

Keeping the data current

The whole catalog lives in one file, data/marvel-graph.json, so adding next year’s slate means appending a title and its arrows, then running npm run graph:validate. That check rejects unknown ids, duplicate or self edges, and dependency cycles before a release can ship. Exporters are included for Postgres and for Neo4j Cypher.

Titles

103

Dependencies

152

Dataset

2026.03.007

Source code

The whole thing is open source, MIT licensed, and lives on GitHub: the app, the dependency graph, the summaries and these translations. Issues and pull requests are welcome, whether that is an arrow the chart is missing, a summary for one of the titles still waiting for someone who has watched it, or a language the site does not speak yet.

https://github.com/Nicolfo/marvel-watchlist

Legal

An unofficial fan project. Marvel, the MCU and all title names are trademarks of Marvel Characters, Inc. and The Walt Disney Company; this project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by them. It stores no media, only title names and the relationships between them.