Last Updated: Dec 27, 2024
Welcome to ReadThingsRight, a website designed to help you navigate the complex world of interconnected universes. With some of these universes as massive as they are, a good starting point and viewing sequence isn't always simple to find. This website is here to try and determine to perfect order for the best audience experience, prioritizing story and cohesive flow over chronological order or release order. I have broken my orders down into ones based on comic books, ones based on movies, and ones based on television shows, all of which generally shoot for the same goals. So if you're stuck on how to read or watch something, here's how to ReadThingsRight.
Each reading and viewing guide is ranked on 3 scales, each from 0 to 5. Quality determines how good the story is on average. Cohesion is how much the story makes sense, even when put into it's best possible order; sometimes things are just really disconnected until the crossover. Accessibility is how accessible the story is for newcomers, assuming they have no pop culture knowledge of the characters.
Starting in 2011, 20th Century Fox rebooted the classic Planet of the Apes franchising, beginning with the origins of intelligent apes and the decline of the humans. Helmed initially by Rupert Wyatt and then Matt Reeves, Andy Serkis portrays the ape Caesar as humans and apes battle for dominance. The fourth film, Kingdom, is directed by Wes Ball and takes place hundreds of years later, with the world wholly belonging to the apes. Despite having an all-new cast, it is thematically consistent with the first three films and is a great watch.
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Starting in 1975, writer Chris Claremont took over writing X-Men with what was essentially a reboot of the series,
picking up from Len Wein's initial continuation a few issues earlier. This run lasted until 1991, so I will be
breaking it up into a few reading orders. This era is entirely written by Claremont (and Wein), including all of
the many spin-offs. This does not cover every X-Men appearance in this era, but focuses on Claremont's sprawling
ongoing story to form a cohesive experience. This half of Claremont's reading order goes from 1975 to 1986,
focusing on the X-Men and their spin-off series New Mutants. The main book is technically called X-Men until issue
141, but I will be referring to the entire run as Uncanny X-Men for the sake of simplicity.
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Based on a novel by Pierre Boulle and adapted by Arthur P Jacobs, The Planet of the Apes sees astronaut Taylor, played by
Charlton Heston, land on a planet run by intelligent apes. From there, four sequels were filmed, exploring the future and
past of the planet. Each film mostly gets a new cast and crew, with only some carryover between films. What this means is
that each film is pretty different, but they are tied together by their themes and overarching exploration of the Planet
of Apes.
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Based on Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball manga, this long-running franchise follows Goku as he grows from a
comedic kid into a fighting machine, facing off against anything from terrorists to aliens to gods. While
there are a lot of non-canon Dragon Ball features, this watch order will focus solely on the canon shows
and films in the Dragon Ball franchise for the most accurate story.