On this edition of AV Club’s Binge Club, our experts break down what movies & TV shows you need to watch before The Marvels. Plus, will The Marvels be worth your time? Should you watch the latest Captain Marvel film? Find out if the latest Brie Larson led Marvel movie is a must watch. When The Marvels premieres on November 11th, 2023, it will be the 33rd film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. At this point, the canon timeline is a mess, and it doesn’t help that several new MCU TV series on Disney+ have muddied the water even further. MCU projects have always built on lore established in earlier films and shows, but when you’re dealing with a franchise this big, it gets a little hard to keep everything straight—and that’s if you’re even inclined to watch every piece of new Marvel media, which is becoming more and more of a chore with each passing film or TV show. Case in point: the Disney+ series Secret Invasion. It takes place right before The Marvels in the MCU timeline, so it probably has some pretty important context for the film, but the show wasn’t well-received by fans or critics. It’s not hard to imagine that many people who show up for The Marvels won’t have seen Secret Invasion, whether that’s due to a lack of interest, bad word of mouth, or simply a lack of time to consume everything the MCU has to offer. And, honestly, you’re better off skipping Secret Invasion anyway: it’s pretty boring and mostly inconsequential … except for a few things that help establish the state of the world in The Marvels. So if you’d rather save the six hours it would take to consume what amounts to “Nick Fury makes a bad decision and the Skrulls are rightfully angry at him,” here’s a quick guide to everything that happened in Secret Invasion, and why it will be important going into The Marvels.
