Every few months someone asks me this question, usually at a barbecue, usually holding a drink: where do I even start with the DC movies? And I get it. Between the old DCEU, the new DCU that James Gunn and Peter Safran are building, the standalone Batman stuff, and the one-off oddballs like Joker, the whole thing looks like a messy drawer of cables. It's less complicated than it seems, I promise. There's a [full breakdown over at MSN](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/how-to-watch-dc-movies-in-order-release-date-and-chronological/ar-AA1HY2Sl?ocid=BingNewsVerp) if you want the complete spreadsheet treatment, but here's my couch-potato version.

Option one: release order. This is how I'd do it, and how I'd tell anyone else to do it, because it's how the rest of us lived through the chaos in real time. Man of Steel in 2013, then Batman v Superman, Suicide Squad, Wonder Woman, Justice League, Aquaman, Shazam! and the rest through The Flash and Aquaman 2 in 2023. Release order keeps the weird pivots intact. You feel the studio course-correcting as it happens, the tonal whiplash going from grim Snyder gray to Shazam's sunny charm, the moment Wonder Woman made everyone remember these movies could actually be fun. Watch it any other way and you flatten that history, and the history is half the entertainment anyway.

Option two: chronological order, for the completists. This mostly matters because Wonder Woman is set during World War I and Wonder Woman 1984 is, well, 1984, so both sit decades before everything else. Start with those two, then jump to Man of Steel and continue roughly in release order after that. It's a fun experiment exactly once. The payoff is small, and the tonal jump from 1984 Cold War antics to Kansas cornfields and planetary devastation is jarring enough that I wouldn't put a first-timer through it.

Then there's the stuff that sits outside the main timeline, and this is where I tell people to relax. Joker and Joker: Folie à Deux are their own thing. The Batman with Robert Pattinson, the one we're getting a sequel to, is its own universe too. Todd Phillips' Gotham and Matt Reeves' Gotham aren't connected to anything, and they don't need to be. Watch them whenever the mood strikes. Same goes for The Batman 2 when it arrives; you don't need homework for a movie about a guy in a rain-soaked trench coat doing detective work.

The new DCU is where it gets genuinely simple, which is a sentence I never thought I'd type. Gunn's chapter one, Gods and Monsters, started with Superman in 2025, with more projects queued up behind it through the rest of the decade. If the whole back catalog intimidates you, just start there. It was built to be a clean on-ramp, and from everything I've seen it's working.

My actual advice, for what it's worth: release order for the DCEU, skip anything that doesn't grab you, fold in the standalones as palate cleansers, then start fresh with the DCU. Life's too short to sit through a movie you're not enjoying just because a watch order told you to. I bailed on plenty of them mid-marathon and slept fine.

If you want the full list with dates for every single entry, that MSN guide has you covered. Me, I've still got my eye on whether Resident Evil holds the box office crown in week two, so the DC rewatch might have to wait a weekend. What's your comfort-pick DC movie, the one you throw on with zero prompting? Mine's Shazam!. Fight me in the comments.