The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a vast world full of heroes, villains, and everyday people you just can’t help but root for. Each Phase of the MCU brings us new stories to obsess over and characters to fall in love with, along with heartbreaking moments like deaths and destruction. Of course, our favorite characters, such as the Avengers, manage to prevail in the end, but there are many obstacles they must face along the way.
At this point in the MCU, we’ve hit Phase 5, which was kicked off with the release of Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania earlier this year. We’ve made it quite a way since the MCU began with the first Iron Man movie in 2008, with multiple movies, TV shows, and even shorts filling up the successful franchise in the years since. We truly can’t imagine the superhero scope today without the MCU. It’s been such a fun ride.
But not all of it has been fun. We’ve had to witness so many deaths, some that have been reversed and others that haven’t. In the MCU, we don’t ever truly know if a character is dead for good, seeing a handful come back in one way or another. But that doesn’t take away from the painful moments we’ve experienced saying goodbye to a beloved character, whether or not we’ll see them again.
On the flip side, we’ve also seen so many satisfying deaths when villains are finally taken down. Some villains, like Thanos, cause so much destruction that we wish they could’ve been killed off sooner. Imagine if Thanos was never able to orchestrate his Snap that changed the world forever. Things would be so, so different in the MCU.
As we wait for the next MCU projects to come out — Loki season 2 in October and The Marvels in November — let’s take a look at the deaths of the cinematic universe and decide which characters were taken from us too soon and which should’ve met their demise way earlier.