Legacy: Alternate Universes

The Alternate Universes era collects the Marvel titles that share characters with the MCU but belong to entirely separate continuities. It spans Sony's animated Into the Spider-Verse, the live-action Spider-Noir series, Fox's 2015 Fantastic Four reboot, and X-Men '97 — the animated revival that continues the 1992 series rather than any film timeline. None of these connect to the MCU's ongoing narrative, and none are prerequisites for it. Its sequel, Across the Spider-Verse, sits in Phase 4 instead: its story follows Spider-Man: No Way Home.

Grouping them together is deliberate. Each is a self-contained story told in its own universe, so interleaving them into the main watch order would imply a continuity that does not exist — and would spoil the pacing of both. Read as a cluster instead, they make a genuine argument: that the multiverse is most interesting when it licenses wholly different tones rather than crossovers. Into the Spider-Verse reinvented what mainstream animation could look like, Spider-Noir plays 1930s pulp straight, and X-Men '97 commits to serialised weight the films never attempted. Watch any of them in any order, at any point — nothing here depends on anything else in the list.