The multiverse is doomed and even Spider-Man and The Flash can't save it
Has Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 saved the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Movie-goers loved it—the film is expected to earn around $800 million worldwide, and the Rotten Tomatoes audience score came in at 94 percent. Critics were 82 percent positive, and they liked it a lot better than Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania (RT critics’ score: a miserable 47 percent), or Dr. Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness (74 percent), or Eternals (with another 47 percent critics score, proving misery loves company).
By most measures, then, GOTG3 is a major Marvel comeback. There must be champagne and high-fives all around over at Marvel Films, am I right? Not if Kevin Feige is as smart as they say. Because what GOTG3 really confirms is that the multiverse—the whole organizing principle behind the still-emergent Marvel Phase Four multi-film story arc—is box office poison.
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You remember the multiverse. It’s a plot device strip-mined for the MCU from old print comics and launched in the Loki TV series on Disney+. It involves ideas borrowed by way of a seventh-grade education in string theory, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and quantum physics, and it’s all about parallel universes crowding each other out of existence.
Lowered stakes and disenchanted audiences
If you’re like most viewers, you actively disliked the multiverse in the fulsomely named Dr. Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness and you truly hated it by the time the equally tongue-twisting Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania arrived. Possibly that’s because, in the MCU, the multiverse has approximately two functions: it liberates whatever pickup squad of CG artists Marvel has deployed to treat art direction like something Peter Max dreamed up while experimenting with LSD, and it’s mostly a way to lower the dramatic stakes.
Think about it: If there’s potentially another Iron Man out there in the multiverse, and he could be played by Robert Downey Jr., how resonant is Tony Stark’s big death scene in Avengers: Endgame? When Ant-Man and company spend an entire movie taking down a Big Bad like Kang the Conqueror, how much should we care if five minutes later the end credits scene reminds us Kang variants are stocked up like Campbell’s soup cans in the multiversal limbo-land they call home?
The Spider-Verse movies are standalone animated features which, despite a few knowing gags, aren’t supposed to be part of the MCU, and they’re produced by Sony, not Marvel. In fact, Sony was allegedly warned by Kevin Feige during prep on Into The Spider-Verse “not to get ahead of itself” by transforming the Spider-Verse into a setup comparable to anything in the MCU. And remember: the Spider-Verse movies are, amongst other things, comedies, using the multiverse premise to make gags about talking pigs.
That’s a flashing warning light writ large. An old Hollywood adage is that parodies and satires mark the end of a cycle, in the way Blazing Saddles came out when the Western was dying. Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein literally finished off the very first cinematic universe: the Universal horror franchise of the 1930s and ’40s, gunned down by the rat-a-tat slapstick of the schtickmeisters behind “Who’s On First?”
How the Flash opened the door
“But The Flash” you say—and there are reasons to treat the upcoming Ezra Miller Flash feature as a different kind of multiverse saga for the DCEU. For one thing, in the larger sphere of superhero comics, The Flash is considered to be the great hero-protagonist of the whole multiverse premise. “Flash Of Two Worlds” is a 1961 Flash storyline widely acknowledged as the birth of the multiverse gimmick. In it, the 1960s Barry Allen comic book Flash uses super-speeding molecules to vibrate himself onto Earth-2, where he teams up with the 1940s Jay Garrick Flash.
The Flash was also the prime mover in what comics aficionados still believe to be the greatest multiverse arc of them all (as well as a pioneer of the “crossover event,” an approach Marvel Films rode to the bank in MCU Phases One through Three). Marv Wolfman and George Perez’s 1985 DC Comics masterwork “Crisis On Infinite Earths” never made it to the movie screen, but it was tributed in a big way by DC’s TV Arrowverse, especially on (you guessed it) the CW version of The Flash.
It’s instructive to take a closer look at how DC comics utilized the multiverse, though. In “Flash Of Two Worlds,” the multiverse was a nifty pseudo-scientific bridge between two continuities: the original 1940s Golden Era DC Flash books and the rebooted and more enduringly popular Barry Allen variant (the one Ezra Miller is playing).
That teaming opened a floodgate, because DC now had access to its entire dead roster of pre-Comics Code super avengers, to use as plot devices in the contemporary lineup. Over time, there were storylines involving the often scarier and more violent early DC characters like Sandman, The Spectre, or even the Earth-2 Batman (you know, the homicidal one with the guns) as story devices in current continuities.
A creative innovation—or just a way to clean house?
Eventually, it all got out of hand, so a part of Marv Wolfman’s pitch when he conceived “Crisis On Infinite Earths” was about housecleaning; at the end of the saga, the five DC universes had merged into one, taking out a lot of dead weight superhero characters (and the Barry Allen Flash) in the process. The closest analogy may be Spider-Man: No Way Home—a multiverse Marvel movie essentially disconnected from any larger story strategy, created to harmonize Sony’s various non-MCU Spider-Man projects with the current MCU.
A spring cleaning emphasis does not indicate DC is betting the farm on the multiverse the way Marvel has. After Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3, though, it would be surprising if Marvel isn’t at least re-evaluating its multiverse strategy—if it hasn’t already. GOTG3 is an old-fashioned closer—the capstone to a trilogy of movies in the way Return Of The Jedi or The Dark Knight Rises also were.
When the GOTG3 storyline ends, our troop of space mercenaries has splintered, and while there may be more adventures to come, the original collective’s race appears to have been run and there don’t seem to be multitudes of Star Lords waiting for their cue. And that’s really how it should be. Because admit it. You’re already sick of the multiverse—and that means it’s not the sort of thing to build the future of an entire cinematic universe on.
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