Video: Recap of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 13 mins

Source: Marvel Comics Studio

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is the biggest and easily the most lucrative film franchise of our time. Marvel Studios hit a home run in 2008 with Iron Man, and has followed that up each year with bigger and bigger tentpoles. Avengers, or the One Where Everybody Teams Up and Things Explode, set an even higher bar in 2012, and Marvel has only to keep topping itself while the rest of the industry catches up.

Avengers: Age of Ultron comes out tomorrow, and it's clearly their biggest effort yet. But with so many interlocking stories, it's hard to keep up with how things got to where they are and where they're heading. Frankly, there's no way to head into Ultron without having a general sense of the overall Marvel mythos, but unless you're willing to shell out a bunch of money to either rent all 11 movies on iTunes or sit through an endless marathon at your local theater, you're gonna be sorely underprepared heading into the theater.

Marvel was so kind as to provide a timeline that led up to the Avengers before its release. It's an excellent starting point, since it dives deeply into when things happened in the Marvel Universe and why.

But 2012 was a long time ago, and these movies have only gotten bigger, weirder, and wilder.  Thanks to the folks at The Verge, they have laid out a through recap of the MCU as a refresher before you head out to see Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Source: Marvel Comics Studio; The Verge;