Stan Lee's 25 greatest on screen Marvel cameos

With Marvel movies firmly established as Stan Lee cameo vehicles (among other things), the question became not if Stan was going to show up in an MCU film, but how and, often just as importantly, when. Spotting Stan became a moment for applause and delight no matter what else was going on in the film, which led filmmakers to try and slip him into unexpected places. In , the big-screen debut of his superteam, Lee doesn’t appear until the very end of the film, and to make things more fun, he’s only there to deny the possibility of superheroes in New York. It’s a wonderfully cheeky sendoff for the film, even before the Avengers go eat shawarma.

Lee’s appearance in also arrives late in the film, after fellow Marvel writer (and Winter Soldier co-creator) Ed Brubaker has already had his moment in the spotlight. Lee’s spotlight comes at the Smithsonian, where he plays the security guard who realizes Steve Rogers has stolen his vintage World War II costume and exclaims “Oh man, I am so fired.” It’s an amusing moment, made more amusing by Lee’s custodianship of Captain America as a character in the decades following his 1940s creation by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.

Somewhere along the way, a Stan Lee cameo started to mean more than a man with white hair and glasses showing up someplace on the streets. Creators started to get more imaginative with incorporating Stan into their stories, and that reached a sort of zenith with the Marvel Netflix shows that kicked off with Daredevil back in 2015. Lee never actually appears in-person on any of the series, but he does appear in photographs, first as an NYPD officer, then as a lawyer named “Irving Forbush.” This means that, on Netflix, Lee is actually Forbush Man, a character he co-created with Jack Kirby, who appeared in satirical Marvel books as a sort of off-brand superhero.

As the MCU went on, Lee’s cameos got more substantial, depending on the scenario in question. In , he got one of his biggest, and funniest, appearances ever, showing up at a party in Avengers Tower and challenging Thor for a drink of some Asgardian spirits. It doesn’t go well for Stan, but at least he gets to drunkenly offer his catchphrase, “Excelsior!” on his way out the door.

As he became an expected part of the MCU, Stan Lee could have become the kind of creator/ambassador emeritus of Marvel Comics who insisted on a very particular brand of cameo for himself. Lee could have demanded he only show up in important moments, or deliver important lines, or play versions of characters he created. But one of the best things about his cameo career is that Stan was always in on the joke, and that’s proven in . Technically, Lee gets one line, but because he shows up in one of Michael Pena’s incredible flashback narrations, he speaks with Luis’ voice, and it’s a delight.

There are lots of reasons to love a Stan Lee appearance. Some are profound, some are moving, and others have a lot of meta-textual lore-building behind them. In the course of decades of cameos he’s appeared as his own creations, alongside his own creations, and even in the midst of amazing battles based on comic books he wrote. But let’s be honest: The cameo is great because he gets to call Robert Downey Jr. “Tony Stank.”

It wasn’t that Marvel movies hadn’t been funny before . It was that Deadpool brought a whole new flavor of funny to Marvel films, an unrestrained raunch that helped make the film a megahit. Given his other cameos up to this point, you might be forgiven for thinking Stan would skip out on this particular movie, but no. He’s there right in the midst of a strip club, announcing the dancers as they come to the stage with all the vigor of your dirty-joke-loving grandfather, and it’s wonderful.

Though he’d long since moved on to speaking roles by the mid-2010s, Lee could still make an impression with a wordless cameo appearance, and he proved it with . He appears only briefly, but quite dramatically, during the sequence in which Apocalypse launches dozens of nuclear weapons around America, watching the sky as the instruments of death fly up. It’s a moving little moment, made more special by the presence of Lee’s wife Joan, who spends the scene in his arms.

After a decade of MCU cameo appearances from Stan Lee, fans had started to develop a little theory about why the same man appears in countless different guises throughout the same fictional continuity. The answer? Stan Lee is a version of The Watcher, a character from Marvel Comics who serves as a passive observer to all the major events of the universe. In a thrilling-yet-brief nod to this theory, James Gunn put Lee in Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2 with a group of Watchers around him, listening as he recounts his adventures. It doesn’t necessarily confirm the fan theory, but it’s quite the knowing wink.

Though he co-created dozens of characters throughout Marvel Comics, Lee is perhaps most closely associated with Spider-Man, a character he scripted more than almost any other, and a character he loved throughout his life. So it’s both fitting and quite funny that for the MCU’s first solo Spider-Man movie, Lee would appear out a window in Queens to chastise Spidey for being a “punk” in his neighborhood. It’s one of those perfect New York-based Stan Lee cameos, and he’s rarely fit into the landscape better.

For most of his cameo appearances in the MCU, Stan Lee’s just … well, a guy who looks like Stan Lee. He has normal clothes, appears in relatively normal surroundings, and he’s usually at least somewhat surprised to see superheroics happening around him. That began to change with some of his later cameos, and in Thor: Ragnarok he got to put in a suitably wild appearances as a kind of intergalactic barber, shredding Thor’s long locks with the help of a kind of super trimmer from hell. It’s one of his weirdest appearances, and one of his most fun.

Venom is a bit of an odd outlier in the scheme of Marvel films right now, in part because of the overall tone of the film and in part because it launched Sony’s own Spider-Verse offshoot of live-action films. But that oddness doesn’t mean Stan Lee can’t be part of things. In fact, though he didn’t create Venom, Lee fits right in with a moment of romantic advice to Eddie Brock, urging the journalist turned superhero to try and make things work with his ex. The sly “both of you” added to his line also suggests that he’s actually aware that Venom’s in there too, adding to the amusement.

One of Lee’s most poignant cameos, if not the most poignant of his career, arrived in Sony’s Oscar-winning animated journey into Spider-Man in all his many forms. Lee famously co-created Spidey, and so it’s fitting that he appears in the film as a vendor selling Spider-Man costumes in the wake of Peter Parker’s death. As he sells one such costume to Miles Morales, a sly wink in the direction of the store’s no-returns policy turns into a meaningful line about the nature of donning a superhero mask: “It always fits … eventually.”

Lee appeared in the first Avengers film as a guy who didn’t believe in superheroes, then popped up in Age Of Ultron as a veteran partying with the Avengers. For Infinity War, he emerged one more time in modern New York City as a school bus driver who chastised Peter Parker’s class for being surprised that an alien spaceship had just arrived in Manhattan. If you connect the dots between those three films, it’s an interesting journey from skepticism to cynicism for that character.

One of Lee’s final Marvel cameos, Captain Marvel was the first MCU film to be released in the aftermath of at the age of 95, and therefore arrived with a bit more fanfare than the others. Lee’s many cameos were incorporated into the Marvel Studios logo at the beginning of the film, and then for his cameo proper, he got an extra little bit of meta-cameo love. In the 1990s-set film, Lee appears on a bus reading a script for Kevin Smith’s Mallrats, one of his earliest and most substantial film roles, in which he played himself, a Marvel legend who appeared to offer romantic advice in the middle of a mall.

Lee’s final MCU appearance as a live-action character came during one of several time travel sequences in , as Tony Stark and Steve Rogers head back to 1970 to get an alternate version of the Space Stone. Lee pops up right at the beginning of that sequence in all his 1970s glory, driving a muscle car, shouting “Make love, not war,” and appearing alongside his wife Joan one more time. It’s not an emotional moment, but it is fun to watch, which feels like what he would have wanted.