Second generation and the Sokovia fallout
Bucky Barnes
Winter Soldier
AliveDoomsdayPlayed by Sebastian Stan
Who they arebeyond the guide
Rogers' oldest friend, presumed dead in 1945 and rebuilt by HYDRA into the Winter Soldier: serum-enhanced, metal-armed, and switched on by ten words in Russian. Everything after his rescue is about whether a person is responsible for what was done through them.
Alive — congressman and New Avenger. Conditioning removed. D
- Appearances
- 7
Along the chronological spine
A life, in order
On screen and off — including the years between films. Tap any entry to read the longer account.
- Turning point— the arc changes direction
- Appears in— on screen, carrying the plot forward
- Off screen— happens between films
- Death— they die here — permanently or not
- Where it leaves them— the state the guide leaves them in
- 1943 – 1945Steve Rogers's childhood friend, captured by HYDRA and rescued, then lost from a moving train into a ravine during a Howling Commandos operation. Everyone believes he died. He did not.Open Captain America: The First Avenger →
- 1945 – 1991HYDRA recovers him, fits a cybernetic arm, and keeps him in cryogenic storage between missions, mind-wiping him each time. He spends seven decades as their assassin with no continuous memory of himself.
- 16 December 1991Sent to retrieve super-soldier serum from their car on a Long Island road. It is reported as an accident. Tony Stark does not learn the truth for twenty-five years, and when he does it ends the Avengers.
- 2014Sent to stop Rogers, Romanoff and Wilson from destroying Project Insight. He wins the fight, then drags Rogers out of the water instead of finishing him, and disappears. The conditioning is cracking.Open Captain America: The Winter Soldier →
- 2016Framed for the Vienna bombing, then triggered by Zemo using the ten Russian words. Afterwards he asks Wakanda to put him back under voluntarily, because he considers himself a loaded gun until the conditioning is gone.Open Captain America: Civil War →
- 2018Out of cryo and out of Shuri's care, on the Wakanda line — and one of the first to go when the Snap lands.Open Avengers: Infinity War →
- 2018 → 2023Present-Rogers wins the fight by saying "Bucky is alive," which stuns him - Howard Stark (1970) does not know.Open Avengers: Endgame →
- 2024Shuri's team removed the conditioning before Infinity War; this is where it is confirmed on screen, when Zemo reads the sequence and Bucky simply looks at him. He works through an amends list and finds something like peace.Open The Falcon and the Winter Soldier →
- 2025He is in office when the film opens and the campaign is never dramatised. The guide flags this as unexplained: he was probably pardoned after FATWS and ran as a public war hero with a hundred-year history, but Marvel never shows it.Open Thunderbolts* →