Steve Rogers

A frail young man from Brooklyn, repeatedly rejected for service, selected by Dr Abraham Erskine for the perfected serum. Erskine is assassinated immediately afterwards, making Rogers the only subject the process ever worked on properly.

He crashes the Red Skull's aircraft into the Arctic to stop it bombing American cities, and survives frozen for nearly seventy years. Howard Stark searches the ocean for him for decades and never finds him — he finds the Tesseract instead.

The team — Stark, Rogers (thawed from the ice a year earlier), Thor, Banner, Romanoff, Barton — spend most of the film failing to cooperate.

Arnim Zola's postwar recruitment programme grew inside S.H.I.E.L.D. for seventy years. Rogers dumps every file onto the public internet. S.H.I.E.L.D. ceases to exist — and the vacuum it leaves is where Ultron, the Accords and Ross's presidency all come from.

Stark and Banner want to put J.A.R.V.I.S. in it; Rogers objects violently, having just watched them create Ultron by exactly this method. Rogers and Romanoff train a new roster: Wilson, Rhodes, Wanda, Vision.

Having watched an institution turn out to be its own enemy, he concludes institutions cannot be trusted with this power. Stark, driven by guilt over Ultron, signs. Both positions are defensible, which is the film's actual achievement. It ends in a Siberian bunker with the friendship over.

Bearded and off the books for two years. He pulls Wanda and Vision out of Edinburgh, takes the fight to Wakanda, and gets both hands on the Gauntlet for a moment.

During the time heist he meets himself and wins by saying "Bucky is alive" — which stuns the younger Rogers long enough to end it.

He returns the Stones to their original moments, then lives a full life with Peggy Carter and comes back as an old man to give the shield to Sam Wilson. How this works has never been settled. The Russos have said he lived in a branched timeline and crossed back; the screenwriters have said he was always there in the main one. Marvel has never picked. With Chris Evans confirmed for Doomsday, whatever that film does will probably become the answer.