Tony Stark

Ambushed in Afghanistan by terrorists armed with his own weapons, with shrapnel lodged near his heart. He escapes in improvised armour, shuts down weapons manufacturing, and then does the thing that starts everything: at a press conference, instead of reading the cover story, he says "I am Iron Man." The modern superhero era begins with a public admission.

Iron Man 2: The arc reactor is poisoning Stark. Ivan Vanko, son of a Stark Industries defector, attacks him; rival contractor Justin Hammer backs Vanko. Stark synthesises a new element from his father's old research, cures himself, and — crucially — is assessed by S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Natasha Romanoff and judged unsuitable for the Avengers.

He carries the warhead into space, sees the fleet waiting on the other side, and nearly dies. He survives — but the vision of what is out there gives him post-traumatic anxiety and an obsession with pre-emptive defence that drives everything he does for the next six years.

Stark has panic attacks and builds forty-two suits he doesn't need. Stark destroys his armours and has the shrapnel removed. So: Iron Man 3's villain is a con man impersonating a man who was alive, powerful, and extremely annoyed about it.

He and Banner secretly use the Mind Stone to build a global defence AI. It wakes up, concludes the only route to peace on Earth is human extinction, and lifts a city into the sky to drop it. The civilian death toll becomes the direct legal justification for the Sokovia Accords.

Zemo's entire plan is to break the Avengers from the inside rather than beat them, and it works with a video: Bucky Barnes killing Howard and Maria Stark in 1991. Rogers admits he knew. Stark tries to kill Bucky. The team never reassembles before Thanos arrives — which is the point of the film.

Peter Parker, fifteen, in Queens, mentored remotely and badly by Tony Stark via Happy Hogan. The villain is Adrian Toomes / Vulture — a salvage contractor whose company was destroyed when Stark's Department of Damage Control took the Battle of New York cleanup contract, and who now sells weapons built from alien tech.

Ebony Maw (telekinesis and manipulation; blown into space by Stark and Parker), Corvus Glaive (killed by Vision), Proxima Midnight (killed by Wanda), Cull Obsidian (killed in Wakanda). Sequence of acquisitions: Power (Xandar — the attack on the Nova Corps happens entirely offscreen between films, acknowledged only in a passing news report), Space (Loki), Reality (from the Collector, in a trap), Soul (Vormir — the Stone requires the sacrifice of someone you love, so Thanos throws Gamora off a cliff), Time (Strange gives it to him voluntarily to save Stark's life), Mind (torn from Vision's head). Thanos then drives a piece of Stark's own armour through his abdomen and holds him there.

During the heist he introduces himself to a young Howard Stark as "Howard Potts" and gets the conversation he never had. Howard finds him oddly familiar and nothing more.

The Gauntlet does what the wearer wills: Thanos willed half of all life, Stark willed Thanos and his forces. It kills him. His funeral closes the Infinity Saga. He leaves a wife, Pepper Potts, and a daughter, Morgan.