With Avengers: Doomsday set to arrive in theaters on December 18, Disney has released a list of 15 movies and television projects that fans should apparently watch, or rewatch, before Robert Downey Jr. puts on a new metal mask and starts making life miserable for roughly half of Hollywood. And while much of the list is exactly what you’d expect, a few curious inclusions, and even more curious omissions, may tell us quite a bit about what Marvel has planned. Disney’s official Countdown to Doomsday watchlist includes: X-Men (2000) X2: X-Men United (2003) Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) The Avengers (2012) Avengers: Infinity War (2018) Avengers: Endgame (2019) Loki (Seasons 1 and 2) Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) Captain America: Brave New World (2025) Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) Thunderbolts* (2025) The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025) Some require about as much detective work as figuring out why there are dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. Fantastic 4: First Steps The Fantastic Four: First Steps introduced the MCU’s Fantastic Four and Doctor Doom. Thunderbolts* established the so-called New Avengers. Brave New World puts Sam Wilson firmly behind the Captain America shield, and Wakanda Forever gives you Shuri, M’Baku, and Namor, all of whom are involved in Doomsday. Shang-Chi hasn’t been seen since his 2021 solo movie, so unless Marvel expects audiences to remember a character it abandoned for half a decade, including that one makes sense too. Then things get interesting. Marvel Really Wants You to Remember the Old X-Men Not X-Men: First Class. Not Days of Future Past. Not even The Last Stand. Marvel specifically wants audiences to watch Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000) and X2 (2003). That’s notable considering Doomsday is bringing back a surprising amount of the old Fox mutant stable. Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, James Marsden, Alan Cumming, Rebecca Romijn, and Kelsey Grammer are among the enormous announced cast. Magneto in Avengers: Doomsday The first two X-Men movies obviously introduce most of those characters, but stopping at X2 is strange. Kelsey Grammer’s Beast doesn’t even appear until X-Men: The Last Stand. More importantly, if this were simply about preparing audiences for some multiversal X-Men shenanigans, Days of Future Past would seem like the most obvious movie in the entire franchise to include. It’s literally an X-Men movie about screwing around with timelines. Yet Marvel says you can leave that one on the shelf. That suggests the important element may not be the overall history of Fox’s X-Men universe. It may specifically be the characters, relationships, or state of that universe as established in those first two films. Or Marvel just made a weird list. Always leave room for incompetence when trying to decipher a corporation’s master plan. Spider-Man Without Spider-Man? Spider-Man: No Way Home may be an even bigger eyebrow-raiser. As of now, there hasn’t been an official announcement that Tom Holland, Tobey Maguire, or Andrew Garfield will appear in Doomsday. Yet Marvel apparently considers the one MCU movie that brought all three Spider-Men together essential viewing. Obviously, No Way Home is one of Marvel’s biggest multiverse stories, so its inclusion could simply be about establishing how characters from different universes can cross paths. But that explanation feels a little thin. Marvel has plenty of projects that deal with the multiverse. It specifically picked the one where Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield crossed into the MCU. Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man in No Way Home Forbes’ Paul Tassi points to persistent rumors surrounding Maguire’s Spider-Man, including claims that Doom could kill the Raimi-era Peter Parker. That’s firmly rumor territory for now, but No Way Home suddenly appearing on Marvel’s official syllabus won’t do much to quiet it. At minimum, Marvel seems to want No Way Home fresh in everyone’s memory. Why? We’ll find out. Where Are Doctor Strange and Scarlet Witch? Then there’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Once again, easy explanation: multiverse. It’s right there in the title. Except neither Doctor Strange nor Wanda Maximoff has been officially announced as part of the sprawling Doomsdaycast. That makes its inclusion considerably more interesting. Multiverse of Madness also formally introduced the concept of incursions into the MCU, something that would be extremely relevant if Doomsday is heading toward the collision and destruction of multiple universes ahead of Avengers: Secret Wars. So maybe that’s it. On the other hand, Marvel telling millions of people to revisit a movie centered almost entirely around two conspicuously absent characters feels a little like Mom telling you not to look inside the closet three weeks before Christmas. Naturally, people are going to look at the closet. Tassi notes speculation that Strange and Wanda could have unannounced roles connected to Doom, though there’s currently nothing official confirming either character will appear. Deadpool & Wolverine Is Another Curious Choice Marvel also wants you to watch Deadpool & Wolverine. Granted, this isn’t exactly shocking. The movie blew the doors off Marvel’s formerly separate Fox universe and directly incorporated the TVA, variants, and dying timelines into its story. But neither Deadpool nor Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine has been officially announced for Doomsday. Marvel even played coy with their potential involvement at D23. Now their movie is apparently required reading. Deadpool and Wolverine died together Again, maybe Marvel simply wants audiences familiar with what happened to the Fox universe before its X-Men start wandering around Doomsday. Or Ryan Reynolds and Jackman are among the increasingly small number of Marvel actors who haven’t been officially announced because Marvel would still like to have one or two surprises left when the lights go down. What’s Missing May Be Just As Important Possibly more interesting than what’s on Marvel’s list is what isn’t. Thor is expected to be one of the major returning Avengers, yet there isn’t a single Thor movie on the list. Ant-Man is in Doomsday. No Ant-Man movies. There is no Captain America: Civil War, despite the Russo brothers directing Doomsday and that movie being one of the most important stories in the Avengers’ history. No WandaVision despite Wanda’s possible relevance. No The Marvels despite its mid-credits scene dropping Monica Rambeau into an alternate universe where she encounters Kelsey Grammer’s Beast, one of the characters confirmed for Doomsday. And again, no X-Men: Days of Future Past. Some of those omissions are downright bizarre. The charitable explanation is that Marvel isn’t trying to create a comprehensive chronology. It’s giving casual audiences the shortest possible path toward understanding the characters and concepts that matter in Doomsday. And “shortest” is relative. The list still amounts to somewhere north of 40 hours once both seasons of Loki are included. Nothing says “the MCU has become accessible again” quite like assigning viewers a full workweek of prerequisite entertainment. Still, the list does try to accomplish something Marvel badly needs right now. It attempts to make Doomsday feel important. After years of disconnected movies, Disney+ detours, abandoned plot threads, characters disappearing for five years at a time, and a Multiverse Saga that has often seemed to have neither direction nor destination, Marvel is finally pointing at a bunch of pieces and saying, “These matter.” That’s encouraging. Whether Kevin Feige and the Russo brothers have actually figured out how those pieces fit together remains another question entirely. But if Marvel’s official homework is any indication, Avengers: Doomsday won’t simply be another Avengers reunion. It looks increasingly like Marvel intends to smash the MCU, Fox’s X-Men universe, the Fantastic Four’s alternate reality, and potentially a few other familiar worlds together before whatever survives gets dragged into Secret Wars. In other words, Marvel has spent years making a mess of the multiverse. Now we may finally get to see if there was a method to the madness.The post Homework: Marvel has Released the Official pre-Doomsday Watchlist first appeared on Worth it or Woke.