So what’s going on here? First, a bit about how this graph is constructed. There are four types of entities in the graph — three of which are pretty straightforward:

Movies: The movies themselves, any live-action, theatrical releases (so no television or direct-to-video) starting with 1998's Blade

The movies themselves, any live-action, theatrical releases (so no television or direct-to-video) starting with 1998's Blade Characters: A character, like Thor or Elektra

A character, like Thor or Elektra Actors: An actor who plays a character, like Chris Evans or Famke Janssen

Actors and characters, of course, don’t appear in movies in isolation. An actor will always be playing a character (even if that character is her- or himself). Thus actors and characters are not connected directly to movies, but are instead passed through entities called Roles. Roles are a distinct combination of an actor and a character.

How actors, characters, roles and movies relate

Actors can play more than one role — Chris Evans has portrayed both Johnny Storm in the Fantastic Four movies and Captain America in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — and characters are sometimes portrayed by multiple actors. Movies can’t connect directly but can be connected through shared roles, such as when a title character appears in several movies in a franchise, or by shared characters or actors. So the Thor movies can be connected to the Ghost Rider movies via Idris Elba, who appears in both franchises.

The 2013 graph clustered into several tightly connected communities that (roughly) corresponded to character franchises:

The X-Men family is divided into three groups — the original X-Men trilogy, the Wolverine Origins solo movie, and the (at the time) single movie of the X-Men First Class franchise.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe breaks down more-or-less along the lines of who the lead character was in each movie, with characters like Nick Fury and Phil Coulson providing a set of shared connections between franchises. Marvel’s The Avengers clustered with the Thor movie, due to the characters shared between them (including Thor, Hawkeye, Erik Selvig, Coulson and Loki).

Despite having two franchises with relatively large casts, neither the three Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies nor The Amazing Spider-Man shared any common characters or actors with the rest of the network making the Spider-Man movies their own disconnected island. (Well, there is one connection, but we’ll get to that later.)

So what does the Marvel movie graph look like today? Well, it’s larger, denser, and more connected with some big changes in how the communities behave.