Stan Lee's 25 greatest on screen Marvel cameos

Stan Lee’s first major live-action appearance in a Marvel property came a few years after the original Incredible Hulk TV series wrapped up, when stars Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno reunited for a TV movie that, as the title suggests, put Dr. David Banner in a courtroom. You can spot Lee during a Hulk transformation scene, where he watches in horror from the jury box as the Big Green Guy starts tearing through the witness stand. It’s not a particularly lavish cameo debut, but it is a little piece of Marvel film history.

One of Lee’s earliest big-screen Marvel cameos is one of his briefest, but it’s also one of his most satisfying. In Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, Lee appears very briefly in the middle of a Green Goblin rampage, but not to deliver a pithy line or stand ostentatiously where everyone can recognize him. No, Lee is shown in Raimi’s film rescuing another bystander from falling rubble, proving Spider-Man’s message that just about anyone can be a hero if they’re willing to accept the responsibility.

With Ang Lee’s Hulk, Stan Lee finally got some lines in a Marvel movie. He appears only briefly, but Lee’s appearance has some added notoriety here because he got to share the screen with another Marvel legend, Lou Ferrigno, aka TV’s Hulk. The dynamic duo show up outside Bruce Banner’s lab, where they’re both working as security guards of very different statures. The combination of some actual lines and working alongside Ferrigno makes this a memorable appearance from Lee’s early cameo years.

With Fantastic Four, Lee once again got to say a few lines on screen, but things were made more auspicious by the film’s willingness to cast him as an actual character. Lee appears in the film as Willie Lumpkin, the Baxter Building mail carrier and, therefore, the Fantastic Four’s friend and mailman. It marked an intriguing early appearance in which Lee actually got to interact with his own creations, and a very rare moment when he actually got to play a character he co-created.

Though Lee is inarguably one of the best known Marvel Comics personalities to appear on the big screen, he’s definitely not the only major comic book creator to have an appearance in the films. For X-Men: The Last Stand, the original trilogy capper over at Fox, Lee got to share a scene with none other than Chris Claremont, the writer widely credited with turning the X-Men into comics’ most popular franchise in the 1970s and the 1980s. Plus, both of them are onscreen during an incident involving Jean Grey, who Lee co-created and who Claremont turned into the Phoenix. It’s a remarkable showcase of two different eras of Marvel history.

Lee appeared briefly in all three films in Sam Raimi’s original Spider-Man trilogy, but he got his meatiest role in the third installment, after two previous appearances in which he only briefly appeared to save another person from a supervillain attack. For Spider-Man 3, Lee finally got a line in a Raimi film, standing next to Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker just long enough to mention that “one person can make a difference” before offering a signature catchphrase and walking away. It’s a nice capper to the trilogy of cameos.

One of Lee’s greatest metafictional moments arrived with the Fantastic Four sequel in 2007, when he showed up trying to get into Reed Richards’ and Sue Storm’s wedding ceremony, only to be turned away by security. It’s a funny moment that also has its roots in a great comic book gag. Lee and his Fantastic Four co-creator, Jack Kirby, were similarly turned away from the exact same wedding back in 1965, in the pages of Fantastic Four Annual #3.

By the time the Marvel Cinematic Universe came around, Lee was already a fixture of Marvel movies, but things were about to kick into a higher gear, and it all began with a slightly inauspicious but still funny sight gag. Lee appears in Iron Man very briefly as a man Tony Stark mistakes him for Hugh Hefner, a knowing wink to an audience who could already clearly see thanks to years of practice who Lee really was. To add to that joke, he later appeared in Iron Man 2 as a man Tony thinks is “Larry King.”

As the MCU grew, so too did the potential for cameo appearances, both for Lee and for his fellow legendary Marvel creators. In Thor, you can find no less than three Marvel Comics icons, including legendary writer and artist Walter Simonson and longtime Thor writer J. Michael Straczynski. Lee appears in the same scene with Straczynski, as the pair play two of the gang of locals who try to pull Mjolnir up out of the desert ground. Lee gets the punchline of the scene, asking “Did it work?” after the mighty hammer absolutely wrecks the back end of his truck.

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 Avengers, 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 Captain America: The Winter Soldier 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 Avengers: Age Of Ultron, 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 Ant-Man. 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 Captain America: Civil War cameo is great because he gets to call Robert Downey Jr. “Tony Stank.”

It wasn’t that Marvel movies hadn’t been funny before Deadpool. 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 X-Men: Apocalypse. 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 his death 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 Avengers: Endgame, 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.