Legacy: 2000s

The 2000s Legacy era covers the Sony and other non-MCU Marvel productions of the decade — Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy and the Amazing Spider-Man films, the Blade series, both Ghost Rider films, the 2003–2008 Marvel Knights run (Daredevil, Elektra, the Punisher films, Man-Thing), and the first two Fantastic Four films. These exist in their own continuities but are tracked here because they share characters the multiverse later reclaims — most explicitly in Spider-Man: No Way Home, which folds the Raimi and Webb Spider-Man casts back into the MCU. (The Fox X-Men films are grouped separately as their own saga.)

For casual viewers, the Legacy 2000s era is supplementary rather than required — a record of how these characters were first brought to screen before Marvel Studios existed. Its through-line is reinvention: three separate Punishers in nineteen years, two Fantastic Four attempts, and a Spider-Man franchise rebooted twice before No Way Home retroactively gave both prior casts a place in the larger story. Tobey Maguire's and Andrew Garfield's returns in that film are the clearest case of the multiverse honouring this material rather than discarding it, which is why the era rewards a completionist even though nothing in the main timeline depends on it.