MCU Watch Order Before Avengers: Doomsday, With Hours

The MCU watch order before Doomsday that Disney itself recommends is 15 titles: 14 films, from X-Men (2000) to The Fantastic Four: First Steps, plus both seasons of Loki. That takes 41 hours 46 minutes, or about 55 minutes a day from November 2 until the film opens on December 18. With less time, six films take 14 hours.

As of November 2, 2026, Disney lists Avengers: Doomsday for release “exclusively in theaters December 18, 2026,” directed by Anthony and Joe Russo. Its synopsis says heroes “from three distinct universes will be set on a deadly collision course,” and its cast list runs to 30 names, from Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans to Pedro Pascal, Florence Pugh, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen.¹ Ticket listings reported in July 2026 put the film at about 165 minutes.² Every other runtime below is the theatrical runtime on TMDB, The Movie Database, checked on November 2, 2026; the totals and daily figures are our arithmetic.³ We make Omniphile, a tracking app for iPhone, iPad and Mac, and the last section shows how to plan the catch-up in it.

How long each catch-up path takes

Counting November 2 and leaving release day free, there are 46 days to watch in. Some countries get the film a day earlier, so outside the US, count to your local release date.

The first two paths fit around a normal week. The full film run means five or six films a week, and the run with every series means more than four hours a day, so pick it only if you already know most of it.

Disney’s official MCU viewing order before Doomsday

In August 2026, Disney+ added a watchlist of 15 titles to get viewers ready for Doomsday, as reported by /Film and Looper.⁴⁵ Looper called it a list with “curious inclusions, and some notable omissions”: it opens with Fox’s first two X-Men films, and it includes Captain America: The First Avenger but no Iron Man or Thor film. The X-Men films make sense next to the cast, which includes five actors from them: Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, James Marsden, Rebecca Romijn and Alan Cumming.

Here is the list in release order, with Loki’s two seasons on their own rows:

The 14 films take 31 hours 31 minutes, and Loki’s 12 episodes another 10 hours 15 minutes.

A week-by-week schedule from November 2

This plan watches Disney’s list in release order, at six to eight hours a week, and finishes with four days to spare:

If a week slips, the spare days absorb one film. If more slips, drop the 2021 and 2022 films first and keep the 2025 ones, which are the most recent.

The short path: six films in 14 hours

Disney’s list doesn’t say which titles matter most, so we chose this path by a fact you can check: which films feature the most actors from Disney’s cast list, according to each film’s cast on TMDB. These six feature 26 of the 30, in release order:

1. X2 (2003), 2 h 13 min

   Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, James Marsden, Rebecca Romijn and Alan Cumming. Of the two X-Men films on Disney’s list, it is the one with all five.

2. Avengers: Endgame (2019), 3 h 1 min

   Nine of the cast: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Paul Rudd, Anthony Mackie, Tom Hiddleston, Sebastian Stan, Letitia Wright and Winston Duke.

3. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022), 2 h 42 min

   Letitia Wright and Winston Duke again, plus Tenoch Huerta Mejía and Mabel Cadena.

4. Captain America: Brave New World (2025), 1 h 59 min

   Anthony Mackie as Captain America, with Danny Ramirez.

5. Thunderbolts* (2025), 2 h 7 min

   Six of the cast: Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan, David Harbour, Wyatt Russell, Hannah John-Kamen and Lewis Pullman.

6. The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025), 1 h 55 min

   Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as the Fantastic Four.

At one film a week, the six finish by December 13. The four actors they miss are in four other films: Channing Tatum in Deadpool & Wolverine, Simu Liu in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Kathryn Newton in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and Kelsey Grammer in X-Men: The Last Stand (2006). With only one evening a week, Endgame, Thunderbolts* and The Fantastic Four: First Steps alone take 7 hours 3 minutes and feature 18 of the 30.

How long is the MCU in hours?

All 38 MCU films released by November 2, 2026 run 83 hours 14 minutes. The 23 films of the Infinity Saga, from Iron Man to Spider-Man: Far From Home, take 50 hours 3 minutes, and the 15 films since then 33 hours 11 minutes. Watching all of them in release order before December 18 takes about 1 hour 49 minutes a day, or five or six films a week:

Theatrical runtimes include the end credits, so skipping them takes a little off every film. Avengers: Endgame is the longest film at 3 hours 1 minute, and The Marvels the shortest at 1 hour 45 minutes.

How long is the MCU including TV shows?

Counting the Marvel Studios series and specials released on Disney+ by November 2, 2026, the MCU runs 195 hours 55 minutes. We left out documentaries and X-Men ’97, which continues the 1990s X-Men cartoon rather than the MCU:

The live-action series are WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki, Hawkeye, Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Secret Invasion, Echo, Agatha All Along, Daredevil: Born Again, Ironheart, Wonder Man and VisionQuest. The count includes the six VisionQuest episodes out so far; its last two arrive on November 3 and November 10, 2026.⁶ The animated series are What If…?, I Am Groot, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, Eyes of Wakanda and Marvel Zombies, and the specials are Werewolf by Night, The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special and The Punisher: One Last Kill.

Estimates of “how long is the MCU” vary so much because of what they count. Marvel Television’s earlier shows on ABC, Netflix, Hulu and Freeform, from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to Helstrom, add another 311 hours or so, 99 of them for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. alone. None of them is on Disney’s list for Doomsday.

Plan and track the catch-up in Omniphile

Omniphile is our app for tracking movies, TV shows, books, audiobooks and games. This is how we would set up any of the paths above in it:

• Queue the films. Mark each film Up Next and it joins the movies queue on Home, whose header shows the total runtime of everything in it, so you can watch the 31 hours of Disney’s list shrink to none. Sort the queue by hand to keep release order.
• Follow Loki episode by episode. Mark it Watching, and the shows queue shows how many episodes are left and how long they run. You can rate each episode as you go.
• Make the list a collection. Collection cards show how much of the collection you have watched. Free accounts can make two collections; the optional Premium subscription removes the limit and can pin a whole collection to Home as its own queue.
• Add Avengers: Doomsday. Mark it Up Next too, and it waits in the queue’s Upcoming group until it is out; with Premium, a release notification tells you when.

Omniphile runs on iPhone, iPad and Mac, with an Apple Watch app, and it is free to download with an optional Premium subscription; every feature is dated in the changelog. It has no Android or web version, so on those, a Trakt list can hold the same watch order; our guide to TV show tracker apps compares Trakt with the other options. If you plan whole weekends of films, our look at whether binge-watching is bad for you has one practical tip from the research: get up and move every half hour.