One of the annoyances of the modern age is finding out your favorite movie or a show you planned to watch has suddenly disappeared from the video-streaming service of your choice. If you’re lucky, it skipped over to another service that you subscribe to. But sometimes, it just disappears.
To understand how often this happens, we turned to Reelgood, which was able to provide us with exclusive data on the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) as it appears on streaming platforms.
Of the 24 major motion pictures of the MCU (as of the release of Black Widow), we got data on the first 23, from Iron Man in 2008 through Avengers: Endgame in 2019. Reelgood gave us the data and streaming locations for all the films going back just two years—any more than that, and this already massive chart would have been unpublishable. The table below depicts everything from September 2019 up through July 2021 (the one above is limited to only the Avengers-titled films).
You might think that since Disney+ launched in November 2019, this chart would be a simple affair. After all, Disney+ is where most Marvel fans would go to see any and all MCU content (including new TV shows such as WandaVision and Loki), right? Wrong. Because the deals Disney—owner of the MCU—has in place with various streaming services go back to a time well before Disney+ existed, even in the fevered imagination of Bob Iger. Some of them go back to pre-Disney times, when Marvel Entertainment was selling movie rights to keep the lights on in the comic-book offices.
Look at the chart, and we’ll explain some of the weirdness. Pass your cursor over a color-line to see what service had the film for each timeframe.
Three MCU movies feature characters that Marvel doesn’t entirely own the movie rights to: Spider-Man (Sony owns the Spidey film rights but cut a deal with Marvel for Peter Parker appearances) and the Hulk—Marvel can use him, but Hulk couldn’t be the lead character without Universal getting some kickback money, since it had distribution rights; that might have changed but Marvel is moving Green Goliath stories to TV via She-HulkShe-Hulk.
Because of that, right now, The Incredible Hulk (the one with Edward Norton) isn’t even streaming for free; you have to buy it. (See it above in gray.) The two MCU Spider-Man films are not, at the moment, on Disney+ either—one is on Starz, and the other is on fuboTV. According to DeciderDecider, that’s going to change. But not for a while. Even the upcoming Spider-Man: No Way Home film is unlikely to start streaming life on Disney+. It definitely won’t get the $30 “Premier Access” treatment like Black Widow. Any Spidey film made from 2022 to 2026 will start on Netflix before they move to Disney+ eventually.
The only films in the MCU that have been truly and utterly exclusive to Disney+ are the three “newest” films: Captain Marvel, Avengers: Endgame, and Black Widow. Even though this is only two years’ worth of data, every other MCU film (except for-sale-only The Incredible Hulk) has been on two or more services.
Because the Reelgood data starts with September 2019, you can see which films started running on services that very month, including such mega-popular MCU titles as Avengers: Infinity War, Black Panther, and Thor: Ragnarok, as they all hit Netflix. Two of those overlapped for several months after making a November 2019 debut on Disney+: Black Panther was the exception, jumping right from Netflix to Disney+ in March 2020.
Sometimes, films come and go from the same service multiple times a year! The original Thor has moved across five different services over two years and seems to come and go from services such as fuboTV and Hoopla consistently, sometimes for just days at a time. The shortest run was 10 days. The same thing happens on fuboTV with many (but not all) MCU titles. Yet as of July 21, the only MCU film on fuboTV is Spider-Man: Homecoming—it’s been streaming there since January 2.
Amazon Prime and Netflix both streamed a lot of MCUs for a time but lost them all as Disney+ grew. Are there any streaming services that don’t get the Marvel movies? Sure: HBO Max doesn’t have any, but Batman and Joker can tell you why. Neither does Peacock or Crackle. And despite Disney ownership, ESPN+ has no Marvel movies, but that might be because it’s hard to work Thanos into the conversation on SportsCenter. Surprisingly, that other Disney-affiliated streaming service—Hulu—streamed only one MCU movie in the past 2 years. Embarrassingly, that film was Iron Man 2, the one everyone supposedly hates.
There are odd appearances for the films on services even now, beyond the fuboTV/Hoopla hopping: T-Mobile’s soon-to-die TVision service currently is streaming two MCU films (Ant-Man and the Wasp and Doctor Strange), Paramount+ has The Avengers, and Philo has Thor: Ragnarok.
Who knows what weird contractual verbiage led to this mishmash? Will this weird, high-tech version of the Merry Marvel Marching Society ever stop bouncing from service to service? Maybe, but it’ll take years.
If you’re curious about where any MCU film—or any other movie or TV show—is streaming, look it up on Reelgood.
