The Madness Of The Multiverse: How Infinite Universes Are Killing The Superhero Genre
Even if sometimes the multiverse can create interesting conflicts, more often than not it's just a narrative shortcut with messy results.
Everybody, everywhere all at once last year was head-over-heels in love with the scrappy martial arts science-fiction flick Everything Everywhere All At Once, the little A24 film that toppled giants at award show after award show.
Spoilers for John Wick follow.
I went into the movie almost entirely blind. I knew it was a predominantly Asian cast including the wonderful Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan, and I knew that it was some kind of martial arts indie superhero movie or something. I didn’t watch any previews. I’d just gathered bits and pieces here and there.
For the first hour of the movie I was enjoying the hell out of it. Ke Huy Quan, in particular, was just delightful, especially when you first start to see him switch between his normal self and the multiversal version that takes over, leaping around like a ninja in the security cams.
The visuals, the fight scenes, the family dynamics, all of it was great. And then it just kept going. And going. It’s not that it’s even that long of a film—2 hours and 19 minutes is short these days, lord help us—but it just kept dragging on with fight scenes that felt endless and redundant and a story that hinged too much on something I’ve grown to detest: The Multiverse—aka, the biggest storytelling cop-out in the history of storytelling. When one deus ex machina isn’t enough, try infinite deus ex machinas all wrapped up in a MacGuffin.
Don’t get me wrong. I liked how the movie ended (and that it did, finally, end) and found the mother/daughter stuff quite poignant. I might have even shed a tear or two. But I walked away from the movie thinking that for a film that took so many shortcuts, it sure was tedious. I still, to this day, cannot understand how it won 7 Academy Awards, and frankly disagree with most of them.
Part of the problem is that I don’t really think Everything Everywhere All At Once really did much to subvert the multiverse stuff being pumped out of mainstream Hollywood. I don’t even think the family-centered theme—a dimension-spanning war of daughter against mother(s)—is all that different than a lot of what you’ll find in the MCU or DC.
I mean, The Flash is all about family and splitting timelines leading to chaos and destruction. Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness was basically about Wanda’s motherhood issues.
The point here isn’t really to cast shade on EEAAO, but rather to point out that in all of these movies and TV shows, the multiverse is primarily a narrative crutch that creates magical answers to any problem (or creates magical problems that require magical answers) and that this kind of storytelling ultimately kills any kind of meaningful stakes we might have. Without stakes, you don’t have any tension. Without tension, not only are the stories boring, they create a sort of apathy or malaise across audiences.
Sure, Tony Stark is dead in this universe, but if Disney can pay Robert Downey Jr. enough, they can always bring him back from some other dimension. Hey, you can write a whole movie script about it. Make it a buddy comedy, where Tony Stark and Steve Rogers are both brought to our world and have to navigate the weird and quirky differences they discover.
Yeah, would you be that surprised?
It’s one thing to reboot Batman or Superman in a new series with new actors. It’s another thing to just bring back characters in an established franchise from the dead or from some other dimension.
One of my favorite superhero movies of the last couple years was Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse, one of the most inventive animated films I’ve ever seen, but even there, as fun as the myriad versions of Spider-Man were, it felt like almost too much.
The more contained Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse kept its story more intimate and while the stakes were still high, it worked without relying too much on the multiverse (similar to Spider-Man: No Way Home, which dipped its toes into the multiverse but kept the stakes closer to home). A third—Beyond The Spider-Verse—is in the works. I genuinely hope it’s great, though I continue to believe that what makes this trilogy special has much less to do with the multiverse and much more to do with the brilliant animation and relatable characters.
In Season 2, Episode 2 of Loki, when one of the TVA leaders goes rogue and starts destroying timelines. “Those are people!” one of the characters cries out, looking at a screen showing a timeline being erased.1
I felt . . . nothing. I mean, who felt more during this scene than they did when that cowardly punk killed John Wick’s puppy? I’m not saying we have to feel that bad all the time, but if you’re going for big emotions, you better deliver!
At least when Thanos snapped his finger, there were ramifications to the world and characters we cared about in the story (though I would argue they never explored these properly). Here it’s just . . . okay, so what? If there are infinite timelines and infinite people, you can just keep killing them forever. I don’t cry for the skin cells I shed each day. That’s how insignificant a multiversal or branching timeline story becomes. Thanos’s atrocity isn’t even a drop in a bucket at this point.
I could keep rattling off movies and shows that have crutched on this gimmick—The Flash on CW kept bringing back Harrison Wells from the dead with greatly diminishing returns—but that would be a long list. I also realize that a lot of these tendencies come from the comics, where it’s useful to have a multiverse around to explain why this or that superhero who died five years ago was able to be revived.
But I prefer more creative takes. One of my favorite X-Men comics was the Age Of Apocalypse, which was basically It’s A Wonderful Life but with Professor X being killed by Legion, and the dramatically worse outcomes that led to in the future. This type of alternative timeline is fun but doesn’t give studios cart blanche to do whatever they want across all their movies or shows. (I realize even that storyline is part of a larger multiversal comic uber-plot).
I also kept hoping that Zack Snyder and DC would do the Injustice Superman story, giving us a fun, dark alternative take on the Man of Steel. Alas, that was not to be. I just wish we could do these alternative takes and versions of characters without having to tie them all back to the MCU or DCU or whatever. I’m more excited for the Joker sequel than most of the upcoming superhero films attached to broader universes.
In any case, here we are in Phase 5 of the MCU with plenty of multiverse to come in the form of Kang and his myriad variants, though so much depends on what happens with Jonathan Majors—brilliant in the role, but caught up in domestic violence charges and other accusations in real life. What a pickle for Disney.
A bigger pickle, however, may be how all these studios extract themselves from this horrible reliance on the multiverse, which clearly isn’t resonating as well with audiences as they’d hoped. As we all know, there can be too much of a good thing. One universe is plenty big enough, and often even the big world-destroying storylines are the least meaningful. Give me Logan over Justice League any day of the week. It’s easier to care about a little girl and an old man than The Fate Of The Whole World.
But that’s another story for another time or maybe even, dare I say, another universe?
Let me know your thoughts on Twitter or Facebook.
A version of this post first appeared on my Forbes blog.
(Loki, however, is one example where multiple timelines and universes actually paid off—a rare example of getting it right, even if it stumbled a little along the way to its powerful conclusion).
I think Marvel made a huge rod for their own backs by tying everything together into one connected universe. It’s so complicated and there’s too many things to keep up with. I stopped watching after Endgame.
You’re right about the multiverse thing too. Suddenly it’s just a story trope not an interesting way to think.
I saw The Marvels with my daughter and some references didn’t make sense to me. The film was okay as a spectacle and explody, punchy ride but the plot was nonsense and everyone seemed indestructible until they needed to lose a fight. When all the main characters can somehow breathe in space and fly through suns, where’s the tension?
I looked forward to seeing EEAAO since I saw the trailer. When I finally sat down to watch it, I was offended at how over the top and absurd the whole thing was. I guess I have aged out of some genres. One of the best comments from an article blasting the flick that I entirely agree with: "This movie left me feeling angry for days. It's like something written by a 12 year old who had just discovered edginess. We've completely forgotten how to construct and tell proper stories now, instead we make movies that are little more than a series of vignettes for a Tiktok compilation. Everyone defending this appalling mess as a critique of something or the other is forgetting one simple thing : a movie needs to be a movie first, THEN it can critique. But EEAO totally fails as a movie - it's all message, no story. We've reached a weird period where people have forgotten how to make art, instead all they want is to be represented and have their cause yelled into the audience."