Stan Lee's Complete Cameo Run: Every Appearance From 1989 To His Final Marvel Bow

Stan Lee appeared in Marvel films for roughly thirty years, and the run is remarkable less for its length than for its consistency of tone. He is almost never a hero. He is a bystander, a bureaucrat, a man who has wandered into the wrong scene and has an opinion about it. That register is why the cameos worked, and why Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 was able to retroactively turn thirty years of them into a single running character.

The pre-MCU era

The Rise of the Silver Surfer gag is the most literary of them. In Fantastic Four Annual #3, published in 1965, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby draw themselves being refused entry to Reed and Sue's wedding. The film restages that panel forty-two years later, which makes it the only Stan Lee cameo that is itself an adaptation of a comic.

The MCU run, in order

1. Iron Man (2008): mistaken for Hugh Hefner by Tony on a red carpet.
2. The Incredible Hulk (2008): drinks the guarana soda contaminated with Banner's blood.
3. Iron Man 2 (2010): mistaken for Larry King at the Stark Expo.
4. Thor (2011): fails to pull Mjolnir from the crater using a pickup truck, and loses the truck bed.
5. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011): a general at the awards ceremony who assumes the missing honouree is somebody else.
6. The Avengers (2012): an elderly chess player who says superheroes in New York, give me a break.
7. Iron Man 3 (2013): a beauty pageant judge.
8. Thor: The Dark World (2013): an asylum patient asking for his shoe back.
9. Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014): a Smithsonian security guard, panicking about the missing Cap uniform.
10. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014): a Xandarian talking to a young woman on the street.
11. Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015): a Second World War veteran who insists he can handle Asgardian liquor and cannot, exiting with 'excelsior'.
12. Ant-Man (2015): a bartender in Luis's story.
13. Captain America: Civil War (2016): a FedEx driver delivering a package to Tony Stank.
14. Doctor Strange (2016): a bus passenger reading Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception and laughing.
15. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017): an astronaut telling stories to a group of Watchers on an asteroid.
16. Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017): Gary, a neighbour who shouts 'don't make me come down there, you punk' during a car alarm.
17. Thor: Ragnarok (2017): the barber who cuts Thor's hair, wielding a device he is clearly not qualified to operate.
18. Black Panther (2018): a casino dealer who decides to hold on to T'Challa's winnings.
19. Avengers: Infinity War (2018): Peter Parker's school bus driver.
20. Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018): a man whose car is shrunk, remarking that the sixties were great but he is paying for it now.
21. Captain Marvel (2019): a commuter reading the script for Mallrats, the 1995 Kevin Smith film he cameoed in.
22. Avengers: Endgame (2019): digitally de-aged, driving through 1970 New Jersey with counterculture bumper stickers. His final live-action MCU appearance.

The Captain Marvel cameo has him reading the script to a film he had already been in. It is the only cameo that is a joke about cameos.

The Watcher theory, and how canon it actually is

In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Stan Lee's character sits on a rock in space telling stories to a group of Watchers, and mentions his time as a FedEx driver. James Gunn has said publicly that he wrote the scene to make the fan theory canon: that every Stan Lee cameo is the same man, an informant reporting to the Watchers on Earth's heroes. Marvel Studios has never issued a formal ruling, so the fair description is that the film's director intended it and the studio has never contradicted him.

It is a good theory because it retroactively explains the two strangest things about the cameos: why the same man is everywhere across decades, and why he is always watching rather than participating.

Outside Marvel Studios

• Mallrats (1995), for Kevin Smith, long before the cameo run became a formal tradition.
• Big Hero 6 (2014), as Fred's father, in the mid-credits scene of a Disney animated film based on a Marvel property.
• Deadpool (2016), as a strip club DJ, and again in Once Upon a Deadpool (2018).
• Venom (2018), as a dog walker who recognises Eddie Brock.
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), as a costume shop owner who tells Miles the suit always fits eventually. Released after his death, it is widely regarded as the best of them.
• Teen Titans Go! To the Movies (2018), a DC film, where he appears twice and points out that he is in the wrong universe.

The Into the Spider-Verse cameo is the one that outlives the rest. Into the Spider-Verse also closes on a dedication card to Lee and Steve Ditko, and Marvel Studios rebuilt its own logo animation out of Lee's cameo footage for Captain Marvel's opening, released four months after his death.

What we did not count

There are archival appearances, animated voice roles, television guest spots and video-game cameos that would push the total well past this list, and there are several claimed background appearances in films where the footage does not support it. We have restricted this to theatrical live-action Marvel-derived films where the cameo is credited or unambiguous on screen. Anything else is a different article.

For the two films where his cameos sit alongside the densest reference work, see the Endgame easter egg guide and the Infinity War easter egg guide.