Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame mark the end of a decade-long saga, told over the course of 22 movies, that have inspired millions of fans around the world and made Disney wealthy in the process.

They’re also incredibly long. Like, super long. We’re talking Lord of the Rings long. If you don’t want to invest even more hours watching the first 20 movies that lead up to that point, either, it can be a struggle keeping up with one of the biggest pop culture moments. Luckily, the incredibly talented students at Walden Grove High School in Sahuarita, Arizona have managed to condense it all into seven minutes.

How, you may ask? Through the power of dance, of course!

Seriously, these kids are incredible. They manage to hit all the high points from Infinity War — Thanos’ invasion on Earth, his fight with Iron Man on the planet Titan, Thor’s close attempt to killing Thanos, half of the world’s population disappearing (referred to as “The Blip”) — and the biggest moments of Endgame. Spoiler alert: watching Tony Stark die again, even in dance form, is still a tearjerker. That’s especially true when it’s set to Requiem for a Dream’s “Lux Aeterna” theme by Clint Mansell.

The video was published on September 6th and has close to two million views, but it seems to just be picking up traction on YouTube. Rightfully so! A dive into the Walden Grove High School’s YouTube channel brings up some more choreographed gems. There’s a version of Harry Potter, a tribute to Pixar, and the Wizard of Oz! Each of these dances are performed as part of their homecoming celebration, which prompts a few more questions, such as:

• When did the students prepare these intricate dances?


• Did they practice all summer long just to get them right?


• How do they choose what to adapt via dance?


• Do they plan to take the show on the road?


• If so, where do we purchase tickets?

Teenagers live in a very weird moment — TikToks are taking over classrooms, everyone has a vlog on YouTube, and people entering high school now were just four years old when the first Iron Man came out. They grew up with the Avengers, and seeing them pay tribute to the fallen is quite frankly beautiful.

Between this class and the drama students at North Bergen High School who put on an astounding production of Ridley Scott’s Alien, it’s pretty clear that the kids are going to be alright.

There are so many streaming options available these days, and so many conflicting recommendations, that it’s hard to see through all the crap you could be watching. Each Friday, The Verge’s Cut the Crap column simplifies the choice by sorting through the overwhelming multitude of movies and TV shows on subscription services and recommending a single perfect thing to watch this weekend.

What to Watch

Waking Life, an animated film that premiered at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival alongside Tape, a low-budget drama shot on a camcorder. Both films were directed by Richard Linklater, and as his first films following his major studio release The Newton Boys, they helped cement his reputation for unpredictability. But where Tape mostly received polite nods, Waking Life won over viewers who were beguiled by Linklater’s attempt to use animation to realize the landscape of dreams.

Waking Life follows an unnamed protagonist (played by Dazed and Confused star Wiley Wiggins) through a series of vignettes featuring characters expressing their most deeply held views about the meaning of life via conversations or monologues. The protagonist describes the process as mostly “just people goin’ off about whatever.” That’s accurate, but as a description, it misses the complexity of the film, which touches on the function of language, technology’s possible role in human evolution, André Bazin, Philip K. Dick, fate, death, the unknowable nature of reality, and other topics.

The people he encounters, observes, or even just imagines include Linklater himself, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy (reprising their characters from Linklater’s Before Sunrise for the first time), Alex Jones (an Austin eccentric before he became an insidious influence on national politics), and famed New York tour guide Timothy Speed Levitch. Each presents an idea or a point of view for the protagonist to ponder. Then they fade away.

Though the film has a progression that ultimately leads Wiggins’ character to consider the role of death in shaping meaning, it mostly drifts from one notion and memorable character to the next, letting the concepts and their presenters shape the animation. As Jones’ rant intensifies, for instance, his face turns red. Some characters look cartoony, others appear almost photorealistic. Backgrounds shimmer, bend, and melt away. The cumulative effect is of reality being pulled in and out of focus.

The rotoscoping process makes that effect possible. The animation style, broadly speaking, traces animation over live-action footage. It’s an old technique, but the film puts it to new uses, thanks to a computer program called Rotoshop, which is created by art director and programmer Bob Sabiston. Where hand-drawn rotoscoping had previously been used to make animation look more realistic, here, it makes the real world resemble animation.

Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures

Why Watch Now?

Sabiston, like Linklater, was based in Austin, and they collaborated again on the 2006 Philip K. Dick adaptation A Scanner Darkly. Sabiston’s work found an even larger national audience around the same time, through a series of bank commercials. In the years since, though, fewer people have explored the possibilities of computer-aided rotoscoping, up to the new Amazon series Undone.

Created by Kate Purdy and Raphael Bob-Waksberg and directed by Dutch animator Hisko Hulsing, the series stars Rosa Salazar as Alma, a young woman who experiences a traumatic car accident in the opening moments of the first episode. The circumstances that brought her to that moment and the choices she makes after the accident are wrapped up in a mystery from her past she previously didn’t even realize existed. Now, her late father (Bob Odenkirk) serves as her guide as she explores her own memories.

Undone visibly draws on both A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life. From the former, it uses rotoscoping’s not-quite-solid quality to create an atmosphere of unease in the service of a science fiction plot. From the latter, it borrows the ability to blast reality open at any moment. In the second episode, Rosa cycles through several different variations on the same experience, each time watching as what she believes is really happening falls apart and cycles back on itself. Like Linklater on Waking Life, Hulsing understands how this particular style of animation can capture a feeling between sleep and wakefulness and how it shows that some stories can only be told in that space.

Who It’s For

Waking Life defies categorization, resembling no film so closely as Linklater’s Slacker, a live-action tour of an Austin populated by colorful characters with a lot on their mind and a willingness to share their thoughts. It’s a great film for anyone interested in provocative ideas married to striking imagery and moving at a pace that lets viewers savor both of those elements. It’s one for the dreamers.

Where To See It

Waking Life is available to rent on all major streaming services.

There are so many streaming options available these days, and so many conflicting recommendations, that it’s hard to see through all the crap you could be watching. Each Friday, The Verge’s Cut the Crap column simplifies the choice by sorting through the overwhelming multitude of movies and TV shows on subscription services and recommending a single perfect thing to watch this weekend.

What to Watch

Mama, a 2013 horror film released during the sleepy January movie season. Its origins, however, date back to 2008. That’s when “Mamá,” a short film directed by Argentinian director Andy Muschietti and produced and co-written by his sister Barbara Muschietti, began making the festival rounds. There, it caught the attention of fantasy / horror director Guillermo del Toro, who later called it “one of the scariest little scenes I’ve ever seen.” How scary? This scary:

With del Toro executive producing, the Muschiettis collaborated with writer Neil Cross (creator of Luther) to expand the short into a feature. That was no mean feat, given its simplicity. What began as a horrific vignette became a fully fleshed-out story in which Jeffrey (Game of Thrones’ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), having lost his money in the financial collapse of 2008, kills his co-workers and wife and kidnaps his two terrified daughters. Heading into the hills, he crashes his car and walks to a remote cabin where he plans to kill his children, then himself. But a mysterious entity that lives in the cabin has other plans, and it clearly sympathizes with the girls.

Flash-forward five years. Jeffrey’s brother Lucas (also played by Coster-Waldau) is on the verge of going broke paying for search parties to comb the woods for signs of his brother and nieces. First introduced sighing in relief at a negative pregnancy test, Jeffrey’s girlfriend Annabel (Jessica Chastain) remains supportive but has no expectations that his efforts will come to anything. If it did, that might interrupt her life of playing bass in a garage rock band, a passion she has no plans to give up.

Then, unexpectedly, a pair of searchers finds the girls, now ages eight and six, living in the cabin in squalor. Both have reverted to an almost feral state. And though they appear to have been alone, when Victoria (Megan Charpentier), the older girl, recovers her ability to talk, she speaks of someone named “Mama” who looked after the sisters during their time in the wilderness. That guardian then begins visiting Lucas and Annabel in their home.

Why Watch Now?

2017 saw the release of Muschietti’s second feature, It, which became the highest-grossing horror film of all time. Now comes It Chapter Two, which adapts the second half of Stephen King’s magnum opus and co-stars Chastain.

Casting rumors surround every major film adaptation, but the casting talk around It Chapter Two took an unusual form. Not only did fans have to consider stars that might fit the characters described by Stephen King, but they also had to consider who might work as the grown-up versions of the first film’s kid stars. Even so, Chastain’s casting seemed like a fait accompli from the start, given her past with Muschietti and the red hair she shares with King’s descriptions of Beverly and It co-star Sophia Lillis. Unsurprisingly, Chastain delivers one of the sequel’s standout performances. But Mama gives her even more to do.

Many of the elements that make Mama remarkable can be found in the original short: the fluid camerawork, Muschietti’s facility with child actors, the eerie digital effects. But the way the feature adds narrative and thematic depth to the scariness is what sets it apart, and much of the burden of that rests on Chastain’s shoulders as Annabel. Trading her flowing red hair for a black shag and dressing in dark clothing, Chastain captures Annabel’s fear of motherhood and a settled life, which she views as a more concrete threat than any spectral creature.

The film doesn’t judge for her it, either. One day, she’s living a cool life in the city in a cramped but funky apartment. The next, she’s whisked off to the suburbs and tasked with creating an environment stable and nurturing enough that the courts will let Lucas keep custody of his nieces. And the girls are no picnic, either. Victoria cowers through life, and Lily (Isabelle Nélisse) holds fast to the animalistic ways she picked up in the forest, growling rather than talking and sleeping on the floor beneath her sister’s bed. Even without a malevolent spirit harassing them, Annabel has her hands full, and her distress and frustration give the film’s title an extra layer of meaning.

Though Mama is a much smaller film than It Chapter Two, both Chastain and Muschietti benefit from the tightness. Where sometimes the It monster feels too computer-generated to be threatening, Mama’s effects lean into their digital origins and create one memorably unsettling monster — one that’s sometimes weirdly sympathetic. Chastain has space to craft a fully developed character whose journey takes her to some unexpected emotional places, and Muschietti finds a single dark fairy tale tone and sticks with it from beginning to end. (It’s no accident that the film opens with the words “Once upon a time…”) It’s such a striking, confident, contained movie that it would be a shame if Muschietti got lost in the blockbuster world for good. Hopefully, like del Toro, he can find his way back to making smaller-scale films between mammoth projects.

Who It’s For

Anyone who enjoys It and its sequel will likely enjoy this as well. And the crowd that avoids PG-13 horror films on principle owes it to themselves to give this one a look. It’s exactly as violent as it needs to be, and Muschietti understands that spookiness sometimes works better than jolts.

Where To See It

Mama is available to purchase on all major streaming services.

The Black Widow movie is finally happening, and Marvel Studios co-president Kevin Feige brought an exclusive trailer to Disney’s D23 Expo, to prove it. Like the new Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker trailer, the Black Widow trailer hasn’t been posted online yet, but here’s what it looks like.

Feige debuted the trailer during Marvel’s segment of Disney’s big Studios panel. It opens with a montage of footage collected from various Marvel movies, including The Avengers, Avengers: Endgame, and Captain America: Civil War. It sets up Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow as a two-timing spy, relying on conversations between Tony Stark and Romanoff in Civil War.

After the Avengers footage, the trailer travels to Budapest, which Clint Barton (Hawkeye) has periodically referenced in the Avengers movies as significant to Natasha’s history. There’s an amazing fight scene between Romanoff and a woman named Yelena Belova. Belova becomes the second Black Widow in the comics series, and is referred to as Romanoff’s sister in the trailer. It’s a lengthy fight, with the combatants breaking plates on heads and dodging quick knife jabs. It’s reminiscent of the close-up fight scenes in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

From there, the trailer opens up with a better tease of what to expect from the movie. Stranger Things’ David Harbour plays Red Guardian, a Soviet equivalent of Captain America. He’s seen interacting with Romanoff and the rest of the assassins he calls their “family.” They run around in white suits, but their goals are unclear.

The trailer ends with Black Widow battling the film’s main villain, Taskmaster. He has the incredible ability to mimic and replicate his opponents’ moves. This seems to hint that Black Widow will be full of intense fight scenes. It’s unclear when Marvel will release the trailer online. The last time Marvel Studios was at D23, Feige debuted the trailer for Avengers: Infinity War, which didn’t show up online for months.

Black Widow is a prequel to the events of Iron Man 2 and The Avengers, the first films that featured Natasha Romanoff. It will explore her life before she teamed up with a group of superheroes. Marvel Studios first announced it was giving Scarlett Johansson her own Black Widow movie in January 2018, after a years-long fan campaign highlighting the fact that Black Widow is one of the only original Avengers who doesn’t have her own movie. Even the Hulk, who is technically owned by Universal Pictures, and who Disney struck a deal with in order to use the character, has one movie in the MCU. Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye also doesn’t have his own movie, but he’s getting a dedicated TV series on Disney+.

Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, and Chris Hemsworth all took multi-movie deals with Disney when they joined Marvel. Although Johansson reportedly asked for a stand-alone Black Widow movie for years, the company didn’t budge. It took more than 10 years of MCU movies to get to 2019’s Captain Marvel, Marvel Studios’ first film led by a female character.

Black Widow will be released on May 1, 2020.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker will conclude the current Star Wars trilogy, and a new trailer showcased at Disney’s D23 Expo teases what that end looks like. And now, Disney has posted it online for everyone to see.

The trailer opens with footage from all nine Star Wars films. A voiceover from Luke declares that there have been “a thousand generations, but this is your fight.” Rey, Poe, and Finn are preparing for the biggest fight of their life. Battleships tear through the skies, as Rey and Kylo Ren meet in the middle of a war-torn planet, ready to fight. The best bit of all? Rey is wielding a red, double-sided lightsaber.

This new trailer comes just a couple of months after Lucasfilm debuted the first one at Star Wars Celebration in April.

The Rise of Skywalker is a momentous film — not just because it’s reuniting Mark Hamill (presumably as the Force ghost of Luke Skywalker, who died in the previous film, The Last Jedi), the late Carrie Fisher (via footage shot for The Force Awakens), and Billy Dee Williams reprising his role as Lando Calrissian. It’s also the last Star Wars movie fans will see for a couple of years. Disney is taking a break from Star Wars movies, according to Disney CEO Bob Iger, who suggested that audience fatigue was the reason the Star Wars spinoffs Solo: A Star Wars Story and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story didn't do as well as the company hoped. Solo was also critically panned.

The Star Wars franchise is set to return to the big screen in 2022 with a new movie from Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson also has a trilogy in the works. Still, people looking for their Star Wars kick won’t have to go far. There are four Star Wars series in development for Disney’s streaming service, Disney+ — The Mandalorian, an Obi-Wan series, a Rogue One spinoff, and a return of The Clone Wars.

Disney also released a new poster for Rise of Skywalker, seen below. The film will be released on December 20th.

Correction (August 25th, 3am ET): The original story said the next Star Wars movie is out in 2021. It’s out in December 2022. The story has been updated to reflect these changes.

Update, August 26th, 8:35am: Updated post to include the newly released trailer.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker will conclude the current Star Wars trilogy, and a new trailer showcased at Disney’s D23 Expo teases what that end looks like. And now, Disney has posted it online for everyone to see.

The trailer opens with footage from all nine Star Wars films. A voiceover from Luke declares that there have been “a thousand generations, but this is your fight.” Rey, Poe, and Finn are preparing for the biggest fight of their life. Battleships tear through the skies, as Rey and Kylo Ren meet in the middle of a war-torn planet, ready to fight. The best bit of all? Rey is wielding a red, double-sided lightsaber.

This new trailer comes just a couple of months after Lucasfilm debuted the first one at Star Wars Celebration in April.

The Rise of Skywalker is a momentous film — not just because it’s reuniting Mark Hamill (presumably as the Force ghost of Luke Skywalker, who died in the previous film, The Last Jedi), the late Carrie Fisher (via footage shot for The Force Awakens), and Billy Dee Williams reprising his role as Lando Calrissian. It’s also the last Star Wars movie fans will see for a couple of years. Disney is taking a break from Star Wars movies, according to Disney CEO Bob Iger, who suggested that audience fatigue was the reason the Star Wars spinoffs Solo: A Star Wars Story and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story didn't do as well as the company hoped. Solo was also critically panned.

The Star Wars franchise is set to return to the big screen in 2022 with a new movie from Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson also has a trilogy in the works. Still, people looking for their Star Wars kick won’t have to go far. There are four Star Wars series in development for Disney’s streaming service, Disney+ — The Mandalorian, an Obi-Wan series, a Rogue One spinoff, and a return of The Clone Wars.

Disney also released a new poster for Rise of Skywalker, seen below. The film will be released on December 20th.

Correction (August 25th, 3am ET): The original story said the next Star Wars movie is out in 2021. It’s out in December 2022. The story has been updated to reflect these changes.

Update, August 26th, 8:35am: Updated post to include the newly released trailer.

Yesterday, French radio station Europe 1 reported that Paris authorities have opened an investigation against French film director Luc Besson, after an actress told them that he had raped her the night before.

According to the complaint, the actress says that she met Besson on Thursday evening at the Bristol hotel in Paris as the Cannes Film Festival was wrapping up. She describes how she was given a cup of tea and blacked out after drinking it, and awoke realizing that she had been raped. She says that the director left a wad of money for her before departing. The actress also noted that she had previously been in an intimate relationship with Besson for two years, one that she felt pressured into for “professional reasons.”

In a statement to AFP News Service, Besson’s lawyer says that the director “categorically denies these fantasist accusations,” and that the actress is “someone he knows, towards whom he has never behaved inappropriately.”

The director of films such as Fifth Element, Lucy, and most recently, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Besson has a history of dating younger actresses: he began dating his second wife, Maïwenn Le Besco in 1991 when she was 15 years old (Besson was 32 at the time), and they had a daughter two years later. Le Besco has noted that Besson’s 1994 film Léon: The Professional, was inspired in part by their relationship, and that then 11-year-old star Natalie Portman’s parents demanded numerous changes to the script because of age-inappropriate content.

The accusation against Besson comes on the heels of a wave of complaints from within Hollywood of sexual misconduct from high-powered directors, actors, and producers, starting with executive Harvey Weinstein last year. These revelations caused the downfall of well-known actors such as Kevin Spacey, Louis CK, and others. This incident came just before actress Asia Argento described Cannes as Weinstein’s previous “hunting ground,” and said that there were people still in the crowd that would be “held accountable for their conduct against women,” and that “we know who you are and we will not allow you to get away with it any longer.”

Deadpool 2 is now in theaters, and to herald its arrival, its marketing team has clearly pulled out all the stops. The stunts for Deadpool two years ago were wild enough, with wacky mock rom-com posters, a fake Tinder profile, and more. Now, the team has outdone itself with promotion for the sequel.

The Deadpool franchise is an eclectic mashup of genres and a meta-parody of the superhero genre, so the very weird tone set by its marketing stunts matches its product perfectly. I majored in marketing in college, and I was once on the brink of working for an ad agency, so I have to give props to this team. In a world dominated by behemoths like Avengers: Infinity War, which is still in theaters, a scrappier brand like Deadpool has to be good at this kind of creative marketing.

Here’s a more-or-less comprehensive rundown of all the crazy ads and stunts that Fox has rolled out in the lead-up to Deadpool 2’s release. (We’ve excluded Ryan Reynolds’ countless tweets.)

First, here’s one of the more convincing romantic comedy posters advertising the initial Deadpool release on February 14th, 2016.

Image: Marvel/Fox via Dorkly

Deadpool 2 started its promotional materials early, as far back as this Bob Ross clip from late 2017:

At Thanksgiving, Deadpool showed us his homemaking skills:

Then, in December, Deadpool released a clip of him learning Portuguese and advertising free tattoo designs in time for Brazil’s annual Comic Con Experience.

On February 7th, a more earnest Deadpool 2 teaser dropped, with actual clips from the movie and glimpses of the action. But just before you think things are getting super serious and heated, Deadpool hits pause, noting that Cable is just wearing a green sock on his arm. He takes matters into his own hands, bringing the Cable action figure out to play house and replace parts of the trailer.

If that wasn’t enough, get a load of the description box for this teaser:

“After surviving a near fatal bovine attack, a disfigured cafeteria chef (Wade Wilson) struggles to fulfill his dream of becoming Mayberry’s hottest bartender while also learning to cope with his lost sense of taste. Searching to regain his spice for life, as well as a flux capacitor, Wade must battle ninjas, the yakuza, and a pack of sexually aggressive canines, as he journeys around the world to discover the importance of family, friendship, and flavor – finding a new taste for adventure and earning the coveted coffee mug title of World’s Best Lover.”

Then around Valentine’s Day, Deadpool 2 dropped several romantic cards, all with jokes tying back to the characters. The text is, of course, in Comic Sans.

Image: Deadpool via Comicbook

For Easter, Deadpool got cozy with a golden egg. Also around this time, he released his own coloring book for the fake holiday National Crayon Day. Deadpool fans who are part of his fan club could receive the coloring pages via email, which the superhero encourages you to color and send back to him. He may or may not hang them up on his wall!

Another celebration that Deadpool interrupted: Hugh Jackman’s birthday message to his wife, as seen in this clip from Twitter. (Also note the song, which is some nice foreshadowing for another stunt to come.)

Both Deadpool movies are R-rated, so it makes sense that the hero advertises some more adult products. His brand of choice: Espolòn, a Mexican tequila company, which gives Deadpool the perfect chance to insult Ryan Reynolds, who recently bought a gin company.

Campari Group via Variety

Let’s not forget the amazing music video Céline Dion put out on May 3rd, which features some poignant scenes from the movie, as well as Deadpool dancing in heels and posing provocatively. “We need to take you down to a 5, 5 and a half. Phone it in,” Deadpool tells Céline. “Beat it, Spider-Man,” she retorts. In some ways, the collaboration might have happened because Céline, like Ryan Reynolds and Deadpool, is Canadian, as Reynolds told the USA Today. In a behind-the-scenes clip, Reynolds says that a hologram Céline performed in the “Ashes” music video because the real Céline has a restraining order against him.

Last week, Deadpool 2 announced a branding deal with Trolli Candy to make an edible candy version of Deadpool’s tiny hand. A poster claimed that the new line of “Tiny Hands” snacks have “delicate curves” and are “intensely satisfying” being “firm, yet, soft.” It was definitely not the last of Deadpool’s brand sponsorships: he also teamed up with Loot Crate, 7-Eleven, and Mike’s Harder beer, but this was one of the more inventive.

Image: Trolli, Deadpool via AdWeek

Also from last week, 20th Century Fox released a YouTube video of David Beckham rewatching the part of the original Deadpool where he gets insulted: “You ever hear David Beckham speak? It’s like he mouth-sexed a can of helium.” Deadpool texts him kissy emoji and begs forgiveness. It’s as if this franchise is generating its own fan videos and spoofs, removing the need for yaoi fan fiction.

Not satisfied to simply tweet about Deadpool on every possible occasion, Ryan Reynolds also went on South Korean television to make a surprise appearance on singing competition show King of Mask Singer as... a sparkly unicorn. In a shimmery cape and mask, he sang an eerily pathos-laden cover of “Tomorrow,” from the musical Annie. His reveal afterward was, understandably, a showstopper.

Image: 20th Fox via LinkedIn

Then, a fake LinkedIn page popped up for Peter, a recruit with absolutely zero superpowers whom Deadpool hires for the X-Force anyway. (He also has a Twitter account.) Peter’s LinkedIn page lists him as an X-Force recruit since April, and a sales manager for Excalibur for 20 years before that. It also boasts a LinkedIn article that Peter wrote himself, published two days ago, with a photo of his wife, her shirtless personal trainer, and Peter. If Peter returns for the X-Force film, I want to hear more about his quirky marriage life and his obsession with bees.

The hype has even invaded the DVD racks in Walmart, where the Deadpool marketing team replaced famous titles like The Terminator or Assassin’s Creed. Deadpool declares obnoxiously but quite in character, “My face is on all these movies that I’m not in! #mustbedreaming”

Deadpool 2 is in theaters now. At this point, you can just think of the film as a nearly two-hour elaborate marketing stunt for Ryan Reynolds.

Spoilers ahead for Avengers: Infinity War.

Avengers: Infinity War is an epic payoff for a decade of onscreen comics fandom. Over the past 10 years, Marvel Studios has released 18 films that lead up to the plot of Infinity War: The Incredible Hulk, three Iron Man movies, three Captain America movies, two previous Avengers movies, three Thor movies, two Guardians of the Galaxy movies, Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Black Panther. All of them have plot threads that collide in Infinity War, and Marvel’s clear expectation is that people walking into the movie will have seen all the previous films.

But that’s a significant buy-in for a film. And as long as Infinity War is the most popular movie in the world, some people are going to walk in without being fully caught up. What happens to fans who have only seen a few of those previous films? Do they just sit slack-jawed through Infinity War, shaking their fists at the screen because they find the story incomprehensible?

“I already give Infinity War an A+ based on my limited knowledge,” says Anthony Baldini, a senior account executive in San Jose, California. “I’m fine just accepting that the Marvel Universe, like Earth, is huge, and you’d have to really hardcore nerd out to know every detail about every character.”

Film Frame / Marvel Studios

Fans like Baldini have their own ways of surviving Marvel’s complex in-jokes. Through some combination of phoning a friend, Googling, or reading the Marvel wiki, fans with varying degrees of superhero trivia knowledge have all prepped themselves to enjoy the film without fully knowing the backstory. And they’ve responded to Infinity War in a variety of ways: frustration, ambivalence, or amusement at the gags and references they don’t follow.

“I didn’t associate Dr. Strange with the Avengers because he just wasn’t established in my mind as part of the main group,” says Meiling Li, a school teacher in New York. “Only when I saw him in Thor: Ragnarok did I realize he was part of the franchise.” Like other casual fans, she caught up on the two previous Avengers movies, and assumed other movies in the franchise were skippable.

Other viewers may have realized Infinity War required more preparation, but that doesn’t mean they had time to catch up. At a Brooklyn critics’ discussion and cocktail hour get-together in early May, Slate movie critic Dana Stevens brought up the backlash on social media she received for not having seen all 18 Marvel films. She’s still not convinced by readers’ criticism that she needed to see all the films in order to discuss it.

The judgment casual fans face from more hardcore adherents is one reason people who aren’t already intensely focused on comics have avoided some Marvel movies. Some expressed their discomfort at the idea of watching or discussing Marvel films with friends who are comic-book buffs.

“I’ve got a friend [named Chris] who has a legit Captain America shield backpack. This is a grown man with children.” says Chris Bryant, a creative director in New York. “He’s got an army of those weird-looking, big-headed action figures that look like they could be bobbleheads. I feel pretty confident with my fan knowledge, as long as I’m not in the room with Chris.” Sao Mir, who’s studying computer engineering and computer science in New York, says if his friends start discussing Marvel films, he outright changes the subject to something he knows more about. “I’m a bit more domineering when it comes to conversation, so we usually talk about what I talk about,” he says.

Chuck Zlotnick / Marvel Studios

But some people see these fan friends as resources rather than conversational competition. “I have a good friend, Hector, who is super into Marvel,” says Meghan Daly, a recent college graduate in New York. “A couple weeks before Infinity War, he literally sat me down and gave me an entire lesson on all of the Infinity Stones and where they all currently were. So that helped me during the movie, and prevented a lot of gaps.”

And for those who come out of the film with questions, there are endless online resources to help them catch up. “If I’m confused, I [read the] wiki after, and that really clears things up,” says Derek Chen, a software developer intern in Toronto who hasn’t seen any of the Thor films, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 3, or Avengers: Age of Ultron. Since he hadn’t seen Ragnarok, he didn’t understand the start of Infinity War, which closely follows that film’s ending. “The only part I didn’t get was who was the guy that sent Hulk to Earth. I didn’t know who he was,” he says. [He’s thinking of Idris Elba’s character Heimdall.] “But I figured Loki switched sides in one of the Thor movies and their home got destroyed… I don’t know what happened exactly!”

Chen says his gaps in knowledge don’t particularly frustrate him, though, and don’t subtract from the experience. He saw the movie with his girlfriend, who has seen all the MCU films except the Captain America trilogy. Chen found it funny when she asked him who Steve Rogers was, during the scene when Bruce Banner calls him. Even so, Chen says “she loved it and didn’t really get confused. I think it’s because we watched all the Guardians of the Galaxy films, and those were some of the best ones.”

For others, the nagging sensation of missing Easter eggs and getting lost during the character banter was strong enough that they’ve already made plans to return to the MCU and catch up on films they’ve missed. “There’s just so much packed into every Marvel movie that it encourages you to watch them a few times, which I like,” Daly says. While she’s only seen a third of the MCU movies, she says she’s returned to favorites like Guardians of the Galaxy and Black Panther several times because she’s curious if she’ll ever “pick up on a detail that went unnoticed the first time.” She adds, “It feels like a mini-accomplishment when I can piece together details by myself without having to look it up.”

Some MCU films are more significant lead-ups to Infinity War than others. Bryant says he hasn’t seen Black Panther, among several others on the list, and that it’s just a matter of time and convenience. Black Panther is still in theaters in some cities, and isn’t yet on streaming services, but Bryant says, “I pretty much never go to the theater anymore. I just wait for it to come out at Redbox or Netflix.”

Film Frame / Marvel Studios

His gap in knowledge became apparent during the Infinity War scenes set in Wakanda. “I felt I was missing the weight of certain characters’ presence and lack of presence,” he says, “Like Erik Killmonger… was he killed in Black Panther? Crap, I really need to see that movie.”

Some MCU films are less crucial to understanding Infinity War specifically because their protagonists have made it into crossover films like Captain America: Civil War. People who didn’t see Thor: The Dark World can still get a sense of the character from the Avengers movies, for instance. But even though Black Panther first showed up in Civil War, Black Panther reveals a lot about his world that’s key to Infinity War. “The only time I recall Wakanda being mentioned was in Captain America: Civil War,” says Vincenzo Landino, a film director and co-founder of an Ohio creative studio. “The chants and other characters really made zero sense, and I didn’t feel connected to them as my moviegoing counterparts did. People were crying [at one character’s fate]! I just figured it was another Wakandan.”

Above all, casual viewers don’t always go into Infinity War knowing that it’s part one of a two-film arc, with the second one not slated for release until 2019. As much as that ending blindsided MCU loyalists, it was even stranger for viewers who expected a satisfying conclusion. Junior Jimenez, a glasses salesman from Brooklyn, considers himself a superfan who avoids watching trailers for fear of spoilers. “I had accepted the ‘good guys always win, for the most part’ cliché, so for me to see most of the Marvel characters turn to ash really left me speechless.” He adds, “It actually took me coming out of the theaters to realize it was only part one of two films, like ‘Marvel can’t end its movie franchise like that.’ That ending was mind-blowing.”

Film Frame / Marvel Studios

In spite of all the in-jokes, callbacks, and payoffs for past setups, though, Infinity War does tell its own story. At its heart, it’s an alien-invasion, save-the-world tale. “I enjoy these movies for what they are,” says Landino. “I’m not going in expecting some indie flick with amazing story and character development. You walk into this understanding, ‘Okay, there’s a superhero formula they’ve got going. The parts that don’t make sense, you piece together by virtue of just understanding the formula.’”

And Mir says Infinity War provides enough conversation and context that he can find contextual clues about anything he’s missing: “Infinity War walks a fine balance between referencing known characters, their attributes, and events from other movies, and developing them just enough in the two and a half hours so that their actions are meaningful.”

Actor Margot Kidder died on Sunday at the age of 69 from unspecified causes. The star of popular ‘70s horror films like Black Christmas and The Amityville Horror, she is best known for her iconic role as Lois Lane in the Superman film series of the 1970s and ‘80s alongside Superman star Christopher Reeve, where she defined the role of the Daily Planet’s ace reporter for a generation.

One of the most popular and bankable female stars for nearly two decades, Kidder struggled with bipolar disorder and homelessness after a public breakdown in 1996. In 2006, after 10 years without a depressive or manic episode, she urged people to have more empathy for those struggling with mental illness. “We are all, each and every one of you in this place, a breath away from mental illness, homelessness, all of these things we tend to so look down on... We are all one human family and we really have to take care of each other.”

Kidder was also an outspoken political activist for anti-war and environmental causes, speaking out against the Iraq War and even getting arrested in 2011 during a protest of the Keystone XL pipeline in Washington, DC. Although born in Canada, she became a US citizen in 2005 in order to vote in American elections and avoid potential deportation for her participation in protests.

Her later career focused on independent films, though she also performed in The Vagina Monologues on Broadway, guest-starred on Smallville and The L Word, starred in Rob Zombie’s Halloween II and won an Emmy (Outstanding Performer in Children’s Programming) in 2015. She died at her home in Livingston, Montana and is survived by her daughter, Maggie McGuane.

There are so many streaming options available these days, and so many conflicting recommendations, that it’s hard to see through all the crap you could be watching. Each Friday, The Verge’s Cut the Crap column simplifies the choice by sorting through the overwhelming multitude of movies and TV shows on subscription services, and recommending a single perfect thing to watch this weekend.

What to watch

The 2013 political thriller The Fifth Estate on Netflix.

Directed by eclectic, Oscar-winning filmmaker Bill Condon, and written by Josh Singer (who went on to co-write the Oscar-winning screenplay for Spotlight and the Oscar-nominated The Post), The Fifth Estate tells the story of how Julian Assange went from being an obscure, lone-wolf hacktivist to shaking up the media and the world order with his website WikiLeaks. Daniel Brühl plays Daniel Domscheit-Berg, an idealistic German computer whiz who helped extend WikiLeaks’ reach, then grew disillusioned with its founder’s recklessness and evasions. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Assange as a charismatic but ambiguous man, who unexpectedly acquires an immense power that he may ultimately be too irresponsible to wield.

Why watch now?

Because Cumberbatch can currently be seen in theaters in Avengers: Infinity War, and this Sunday night will be on Showtime in Patrick Melrose.

Patrick Melrose is a five-part miniseries, based on five autobiographical Edward St. Aubyn novels, tracing the author’s troubled youth and his journey toward domestic normalcy — all set against the backdrop of the English upper-class. Cumberbatch is one of the lead producers on the project, which was written by David Nicholls and directed by Edward Berger. He’s playing the title character at various phases in his life, capturing the dark humor and heavy struggle of a man working hard to overcome his own weaknesses and addictions, along with his memories of growing up in abusive environment.

The Showtime series (also airing on Sky Atlantic in the UK) is a rare case of Cumberbatch taking on the role of a relatively ordinary person. Much of his TV and movie career to date has been divided between playing well-known genre characters and historical figures. He’s been Sherlock Holmes, Star Trek’s Khan, The Hobbit’s Smaug, and — in theaters right now — Marvel Comics’ “sorcerer supreme,” Dr. Stephen Strange. He’s also played Richard III, Stephen Hawking, Alan Turing, and Thomas Edison — plus, obviously, Julian Assange.

Before The Fifth Estate debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in fall 2013, it was pegged as a potential Oscar-contender. Then the reviews were less-than-enthusiastic, and the movie eventually got lost in an awards season that also included such heavy-hitters as Gravity, The Wolf of Wall Street, Nebraska, American Hustle, Dallas Buyers Club, Captain Phillips, Her, and 12 Years a Slave (in which Cumberbatch played a supporting role). Frankly, The Fifth Estate isn’t up to the level of those other films. But Cumberbatch gives a performance that’s very much the equal of his more high-profile work, doing what he does best: bringing deeply felt nuance to a larger-than-life character.

Who it’s for

WikiLeaks haters itching to say, “I told you so.”

There’s a reason The Fifth Estate never developed much momentum in 2013, either at the box office or with critics. The film is often corny and clunky, relying on visual flourishes to keep viewers alert, and flatly functional dialogue to keep them informed. But while Condon and Singer didn’t exactly make high art, they did more or less accomplish what they set out to do, delivering a gripping, easy-to-understand movie about a complicated subject.

Given that Assange’s public profile has changed dramatically in the past five years, The Fifth Estate is more fascinating now than it was in its own day. On the whole, the film’s take on WikiLeaks is more positive than negative, suggesting that the ideals of citizen journalism and the free flow of information are too important to toss aside because of one man’s dodgy personal ethics. There’s very little in this picture about the sexual assault charges leveled at Assange, and nothing about his recently alleged connections to the Russian government. But the movie is slightly ahead of the curve in branding Assange as a self-aggrandizing hustler.

The Fifth Estate’s cast was impressive even in 2013, with powerhouses like David Thewlis, Stanley Tucci, and Laura Linney filling some of the smaller roles. But it’s even more of a who’s-who now, given that some of the other supporting players — Anthony Mackie, Alicia Vikander, Carice van Houten, and Dan Stevens — have become bigger stars over the past few years. The same could be said of Cumberbatch, who built up a lot of buzz in the early 2010s thanks to TV’s Sherlock, and now seems to be entering a phase in his career where he’s leveraging his popularity to make both blockbuster films and smaller, more personal pieces.

Almost as much as its prescient, darkly shaded portrait of Assange, The Fifth Estate may end up being remembered as some of Cumberbatch’s best work. He treads a careful line throughout the movie, making his character sympathetic at times, without holding back in the moments when he’s meant to be pushy, devious, or egomaniacal. Throughout The Fifth Estate, Assange argues that WikiLeaks doesn’t discriminate with what it publishes, because “editing reflects bias.” Cumberbatch follows a similar philosophy. It’s a warts-and-all performance.

Where to see it

Netflix. Subscribers can then construct their own little Cumberbatch film festival, moving on from The Fifth Estate to Doctor Strange, The Imitation Game, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Atonement, and Sherlock.