The Marvel Cinematic Universe—Marvel Studios’ attempt at creating a shared reality for their incredibly lucrative stable of characters to punch and blow each other up in—has produced a steady stream of surprisingly great summer blockbusters, most of which have benefited greatly from the added depth of shared continuity. The realities of the various movie licensing deals Marvel made with other studios before starting their own, though, leave some of the company’s most beloved characters banned from the playground. The X-Men exist in their own little world. So do the Fantastic Four. Even Spider-Man, arguably Marvel’s heart and soul, is contractually unavailable to go out avenging with Steve Rogers and Tony Stark.
Luckily, people on the Internet don’t have to pay attention to things like “contracts” or “film rights.” That means they can make things like this fan trailer, edited together by Youtube user SouperboyX (real name Kevin Dwyer), which mashes up footage from pretty much every Marvel movie ever made from 1998’s Blade all the way up to test footage for the upcoming Ant-Man into an epic battle royale. Using some clever cross-cutting, Dwyer manages to make something that’s more than just the sum of its stitched-together parts. There’s the skeleton of a coherent story here, with all of Marvel’s heroes coming together to stop Doctor Doom from claiming the uber-Macguffin Tesseract, which appears to be drawing the planet-devouring Galactus toward Earth.
Of course, you could make the argument that this sort of mash-up is only possible because the average modern movie trailer it’s aping has become little more than a collection of cool lines spoken over engaging visuals, with little coherence or connection. But even so, Dwyer’s work makes us legitimately wish the movie in question was being made, which is just about the highest praise you can give to a fan trailer like this.