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The MCU is so big Disney Plus is getting a new Legends clip show to help you keep track

The MCU is so big Disney Plus is getting a new Legends clip show to help you keep track

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CliffsNotes for all of the Marvel movies

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Disney has announced that yet another new Marvel series is coming to Disney Plus: Marvel Studios: Legends. The new ongoing series will “showcase individual characters viewers have come to know and love over the years and revisit some of their most iconic moments.” In other words, it seems like Marvel Studios is making its own clip show to recap the franchise before its major new releases.

Legends will kick off with two episodes focusing on the characters of Wanda Maximoff and Vision, respectively, to help refresh viewers’ memories of the two heroes’ history in the previous Marvel films. The episodes will unsurprisingly debut on Disney Plus on January 8th, 2021 — just a week before the first episode of WandaVision is due to be released on January 15th.

The show is a tacit admission that Marvel’s interconnected world of movies and TV shows might just be starting to get a little too unwieldy for more casual viewers to keep track of. With 23 films already out and another 10 on the way, along with the upcoming deluge of Disney Plus shows (with 12 of those already announced), that’s a lot of character history and backstory that fans are expected to be at least passingly familiar with to keep up with the new content.

The strategy is a familiar one: Marvel already uses similar one-page recaps in its own comics to help new readers catch up on ongoing series.

It’s easy to imagine how Disney will leverage Legends going forward: Falcon and Winter Soldier episodes that remind viewers of Bucky’s complicated history and how Sam Wilson ended up with Captain America’s shield, or an episode before Loki’s debut tracking the time-traveling shenanigans of the fan-favorite villain.

Marvel Studios: Legends joins a dizzying array of Marvel shows set for Disney Plus, including WandaVision (January 15th), The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (March), Loki (May), Ms. Marvel (late 2021), Hawkeye (2021), What If...?, Moon Knight, She-Hulk, Secret Invasion, Ironheart, Armor Wars, and I Am Groot.