Avengers: Infinity War Guide: Where to Watch, Cast and Runtime

The setup film that earns its cliffhanger

Infinity War is not a complete story by itself — it is the first half of a two-film finale that Avengers: Endgame completes a year later, and it plays best watched that way rather than judged on its own. Thanos has been the MCU’s quiet background villain since the first Avengers in 2012, slowly assembling the Infinity Stones, and this is the film where he finishes the job: nearly every hero roughly twenty films had built up by this point — the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Panther’s Wakanda, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man — converges to stop him, and loses.

It is the biggest ensemble Marvel Studios had assembled up to that point, and the film’s structure splits the cast across four or five storylines running in parallel — New York, the ship en route to Titan, Wakanda, Knowhere, Thanos’s own path through the stones — that mostly do not meet until the very end. That is deliberate rather than a pacing problem, and it is why the cast list below reads less like a lead-and-supporting chart and more like a full roster: almost no one in it is incidental to the plot.

Watch order: directly after Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, Thor: Ragnarok, Black Panther and Doctor Strange — all five set up a character, a relationship or a stake this film assumes is already in place. It leads straight into Avengers: Endgame; our Endgame guide covers the other half of the story. The production record has the full cast and crew.