The Super-Soldier Serum

also known as Erskine's Formula · Project Rebirth · The Super Soldier Serum

Erskine's formula and everyone who tried to recreate it — usually with a body count.

12 entries 6 films 6 episodes 17h 44m

Abraham Erskine dies with the only working formula in his head about ten minutes into the MCU, and the next eighty years of the franchise is people trying to rebuild it. That chain runs through HYDRA's Winter Soldier programme, a segregated Army unit in 1951, a gamma lab in Virginia, a chemist in Madripoor and a CIA front company — and almost every recreation produces a monster or a corpse. This is the order for the through-line the movies keep calling their original sin.

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Captain America: The First Avenger
Film · 2011124m
Erskine's early, unstable version turns Johann Schmidt into the Red Skull in 1934; the refined formula plus Stark's Vita-Rays turns Steve Rogers into Captain America in a Brooklyn basement in 1943. Erskine is shot minutes later and the remaining serum is destroyed in the chase.
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What If... Captain Carter Were the First Avenger?
What If...? · S1 E1 · 202133m
Alternate 1943. Peggy Carter steps into the chamber instead of Steve and the procedure works identically — the clearest demonstration in the MCU that the serum amplifies what is already there rather than choosing a body type.
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The Incredible Hulk
Film · 2008112m
General Ross reveals the gamma project was a revival of the WWII super-soldier programme, which is what Banner was actually working on. Emil Blonsky is given a derived serum that makes him faster and stronger, then demands more and becomes the Abomination — the first modern proof that the recreations go wrong.
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Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Film · 2014136m
Arnim Zola's HYDRA rebuilt a version well enough to keep Bucky Barnes alive and enhanced since 1945, which is why the Winter Soldier can trade blows with Steve. The film treats the formula as HYDRA's real inheritance from the war.
Also in +2
Captain America: Civil War
Film · 2016147m
The 1991 flashback is the serum's most consequential theft: HYDRA sends the Winter Soldier to kill Howard and Maria Stark for a case of Zola's serum, which is then used on five more Winter Soldiers in Siberia. Zemo shoots all five in their cryo pods before the heroes arrive.
Also in +4
The Star-Spangled Man
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier · S1 E2 · 202150m
Bucky takes Sam to a house in Baltimore to meet Isaiah Bradley, revealing that the United States successfully made more super soldiers after Steve and then buried them.
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Power Broker
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier · S1 E3 · 202153m
In Madripoor they find Dr. Wilfred Nagel, who tells them he rebuilt the serum for the Power Broker using blood samples taken from Isaiah Bradley, producing twenty vials that Karli Morgenthau stole. Zemo shoots him mid-sentence.
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The Whole World Is Watching
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier · S1 E4 · 202153m
Zemo catches up with the vials and smashes them, but misses one; John Walker recovers it and injects himself. The episode ends with a serum-enhanced Walker killing a man in the street.
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Truth
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier · S1 E5 · 202160m
Isaiah Bradley tells his whole story: he and other Black soldiers were injected in 1951 without being told what it was, sent to Korea, and Isaiah spent thirty years imprisoned and experimented on before a nurse forged his death certificate.
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One World, One People
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier · S1 E6 · 202151m
The Flag Smashers' stolen doses drive the finale, and Sam finishes the series as the only Captain America with no serum at all — the point the whole run has been building to.
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Captain America: Brave New World
Film · 2025118m
Isaiah Bradley's serum-era past is the hook the villain uses against him, and Samuel Sterns's gamma expertise is treated as the modern continuation of the same programme.
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Thunderbolts*
Film · 2025127m
Valentina Allegra de Fontaine's shell company O.X.E. ran illegal human trials trying to rebuild the serum; every subject died except Bob Reynolds, who came out of it as the Sentry. The trials are also what gets her impeached.
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