The Marvel Cinematic Universe began in 2008 with Iron Man, starring Robert Downey Jr. and produced by Marvel Studios under president Kevin Feige. What made the film significant wasn’t just its success, but its closing scene: a post-credits appearance from Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, teasing a larger, connected world of superheroes. That single idea — that individual franchises could share continuity, characters, and consequences across dozens of films — became the founding principle of the MCU and reshaped how studios approached blockbuster filmmaking for the next decade and beyond.
The MCU has since been organised into distinct chapters, beginning with the ‘Infinity Saga’ spanning Phases One through Three, which ran from Iron Man in 2008 through to Avengers: Endgame in 2019 — at the time, the highest-grossing film in history. The ‘Multiverse Saga’ that followed expanded the universe further still, folding in Disney+ series such as WandaVision, Loki, and Daredevil: Born Again alongside its theatrical releases, and using the concept of a multiverse to introduce new versions of familiar characters without discarding everything that came before. Across more than thirty-five films and a growing slate of television series, the MCU has grossed in excess of $30 billion worldwide, making it comfortably the highest-grossing film franchise ever made and reshaping the economics of the modern film industry in the process.
Few franchises can match the MCU’s ensemble, built around Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark, Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff, and Samuel L. Jackson’s ever-present Nick Fury, tying the whole universe together across well over a decade. Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock has followed one of the more unusual paths into the MCU proper, originating in Netflix’s Daredevil (2015) before being folded into the mainline universe through a cameo in Spider Man: No Way Home and, more recently, his own Disney+ series, Daredevil: Born Again — a rare example of a character built outside the MCU earning a full seat at its table.
The MCU’s dominance over modern popular culture is difficult to overstate: it has driven box office records, defined the shape of the modern blockbuster release calendar, and built one of the largest and most active collector communities of any franchise, spanning props, comics, Funko Pops, and signed memorabilia across dozens of characters and actors. San Diego Comic-Con panels for the MCU regularly draw some of the largest crowds of the entire convention, and its actors are consistently among the most requested guests on the wider signing circuit. With the Multiverse Saga still unfolding and new Disney+ series continuing to expand the roster of characters in play, demand for MCU signings and collectibles shows no sign of slowing.
At Pioneer Signings, our MCU archive currently features a Daredevil ‘Matt Murdock’ 16×20 print signed by Charlie Cox, tied to one of the more distinctive character journeys in the wider universe. Given the sheer scale of the MCU’s cast and the enduring appetite for signed pieces tied to it, this is very much a starting point rather than the finished picture — we’re looking to bring in further Marvel signings across both the films and Disney+ series as our archive continues to grow.
