I am addicted. I have to watch every Marvel movie that comes to the cinemas these days. Especially the Avengers movies take a lot of my time, because I watch them over and over again (the fact that I’m deeply in love with Jeremy Renner aka Hawkeye might be one of the reasons…). So at the moment, I am very happy! Obviously. “Doctor Strange” was in cinemas recently and of course I bought the Bluray of “Captain America – Civil War” on the release day. Plus 2017 will be a year of a lot other releases like “Wonder Woman”, “Guardians of the Galaxy 2”, …

To be honest – I don’t know what happened. I don’t read comics at all and when the first Marvel movies hit the cinemas, I wasn’t interested much. I watched “The Avengers” once on DVD, as well as “Thor” which I didn’t like back then. But after watching “Avengers – Age of Ultron” I had to watch/rewatch all of them and my collection of Blurays has grown since then.

What I love about the Marvel movies is that it’s a whole universe.

The different stories are connected and actually follow a story line. Some funny facts, running gags and backgrounds can only be understood, if you know the other movies. BUT you can follow and understand the story itself anyway without knowing the other movies. Some people call me alien, because I don’t watch any series at all (except Sailor Moon and Power Rangers). But “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” got me and I love that the story is influenced by the movie’s plot (even though I’m not binge-watching or going crazy about a new season/episode). Plus I buy a lot of merchandise, especially shirts.

For those of you who actually aren’t familiar with the story, let me help you: In World War II, the Americans created Captain America – one could say he is a mutant, getting his super powers out of a science experiment. After doing his job, he flew an airplane into a sea of ice to save the world and woke up many, many years later. During that time Tony Stark, a super talented mechanic, built an armour with which he is able to fly and do other amazing things, calling himself Iron Man. He had to do this, because he was kidnapped and it was the only possibility to flee. After all, Iron Man was born and starting to save the world, too.

You know the big green guy? Hulk is not a classical hero. He doesn’t want to be one and cannot control himself, but he has a good heart and also is a very, very intelligent man. He and Tony Stark are brothers in science, so to speak. The other important hero, Thor, is the god of thunder. He was sent to earth by his father after neglecting his orders and then fell in love with a woman and the planet itself.

There are two main characters who are often called sidekicks, but their importance grows with every story they take part in: Natasha Romanoff is Black Widow, an agent who was trained in Russia, Clint Barton is Hawkeye, an amazing archer,  also good at combat fighting. They don’t have their own movies, but appear in some of them (all the connections…) – there are rumours about a series on Hawkeye which I definetly would watch by the way (thanks to Jeremy, again)! They know each other for a long time – Hawkeye has been a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent for a long time and one of his missions was to kill Black Widow who was trained by the Soviets to be a killing machine. But when they met, he didn’t kill her and she became a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, too (they aren’t a couple, though and we find out about Hawkeye’s private life in “Age of Ultron”).

So we have three normal people who have very, very good skills (Black Widow, Hawkeye, Iron Man) and three people with super powers (Captain America, Hulk, Thor) forming a team called the Avengers. During the movies, more heroes join the team. They come together to save the world from aliens, robots, artificial intelligence, psychopaths and so on. The story behind all of it is that they have to find the infinity stones. Otherwise, an alien king would conquer the world – you might have seen him in “Guardians of the Galaxy”. And this is the other thing I’m curious about: The guardians will join forces sooner or later!

But the Avengers had to decide recently, if they want to quit doing what they do or work for the US government. That led to a split – Captain America doesn’t want to work for an institution, Iron Man agrees. I was really, really afraid of this movie and don’t know how I managed not to cry, when my heroes fought against each other. Now I’m really looking forward to the reunion – because that has to happen when the space invaders appear again.

Simple stories – but a lot of action, humour and science fiction!

The other Marvel team that is not connected to the Avengers’ universe (as far as I know) is X-Men. There are mutants living in our world – it just happened, you might be born as a mutant and have super powers. It’s nothing you can achieve by doing something. Charles Xavier aka Professor X has a school for mutants in which they learn “normal” stuff like history, math and so on, but also how to control and live with their super powers. There have been mutants for a long time, because Magneto was a child during the time when the Nazis ruled Germany and in “X-Men Apocalypse” a mutant appears that was buried in a pyramid for thousands of years. Some people fear the mutants, some mutants are evil and want to rule the world, some even want to destroy it.

And that’s more or less what the stories are about. There is no enemy from outside of the world. But there are different storylines! The first X-Men movies are older and they are about one of the storylines, including the Wolverine movies. In “X-Men: Days of future past” nearly all mutants have been killed and Wolverine was sent back in time to change a key event that led to this. He succeeded and another storyline was born, playing in the parallel universe where that event didn’t happen and mostly featuring the younger versions of X-Men.

Now, with the upcoming movie “Logan”, a third storyline is written – the time after “X-Men: Days of future past” when the mutants lost and most of them were killed, so after Wolverine failed in saving them. But as I said earlier, some people are born as mutants out of nothing so there will always be others.

Confusing? I know! But you can understand every movie in itself and watching them in the right “order” is fun! Even though I only watched the first Wolverine movie, I am able to follow the plot. The most important X-Men who appear in almost every movie are Professor X as founder and headmaster of the school, Magneto, who first tried to conquer Professor X but is allied with him now, Mystique and Wolverine. Deadpool belongs to the universe of the X-Men by the way (did I say, you are born with your super powers? Well the exception proves the rule, right?).

Double agents.

Two characters belong to both universes: Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver. The two are brother and sister (Magneto’s children) and appear in “Age of Ultron” together. But Quicksilver plays an important role in “X-Men: Days of future past” and “X-Men Apocalypse”… I guess, Marvel decided to split the couple and (spoiler alert!) let Quicksilver die in “Age of Ultron”. Scarlet Witch doesn’t appear in X-Men at all (yet).

Another confusing fact is that several people own the rights on the characters. Disney is not allowed to do a Hulk movie. The Hulk can appear in the movies but he can’t have his own. The actors playing Hulk in the already existing Hulk movies are different from our current Hulk (which isn’t that bad because the character grew older). But he’ll appear in Thor 3! And there is still hope for another Hulk movie if the parties can agree on selling the licence.

What’s next?

As I said, there are some really amazing movies coming in 2017! I’m looking forward to these Marvel movies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs6wT00udeY

Do you like these movies? Did you read the comics? Are you as excited as I am to see the upcoming films? Let us know in the comments!