The Multiverse has become a common plot point in Hollywood recently, and it is easily one of the most hated. It seems as though every movie and TV Show has some sort of multiverse plot, and out of the multitudinous projects to feature the concept, it seems that very few of them include it in a unique and interesting way.
The beginning of the Multiverse trend can be traced back to the Spider-Verse storyline in Marvel Comics. This was a widely loved storyline warranting its adaptation into a film with Sony Animation’s Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse released in 2018. When executives saw the runaway success, they immediately began the push to include the concept of the multiverse into more projects.
Of course the most infamous culprit of the abuse of the concept is of course the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with the multiverse being the focus of their phases 4 through 6, with projects such as Loki, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, with varying degrees of success and quality. DC, Marvel’s main competitor, was of course desperate to replicate them after their years of success, and blind to the growing disdain for the concept of the multiverse, released the insult to human senses that is 2023’s The Flash.
The concept itself is not the issue, projects such as the previously mentioned Spider-Verse duology as well as Prime Video’s Invincible have been able to masterfully utilize the concept of alternate versions of characters to tell compelling character-based stories with the characters of Miles Morales and Mark Grayson respectively. The issue lies with the greedy executive, desperate to get a slice of the seemingly lucrative multiversal pie. These executives pushing their writers to include the multiverse like it’s some kind of cheat code have led to lazy, repetitive stories.
The multiverse is a symptom of a wider sickness in Hollywood. In recent years, studio executives have been sacrificing more and more to fill their own pockets. These sacrifices come at the expense of various people, including the writers. The already incredibly underpaid writers are given next to no time to put together a strong storyline, and are then unceremoniously axed as soon as the scripts are done. This leads to almost no collaboration between writer and director, something that is absolutely necessary to tell a compelling story. The suits happily undercut the writers who weave the stories that people pay for and then are confused when the stories aren’t as good and make less money. The only way that people can help this issue is to support good movies by going to see them in the Theaters and avoiding the lazy slop. By doing this, it can only be so long before the business men who make the decisions realize that people appreciate the passion at the core of a project, not the surface-level imitation of complexity genetically engineered to be marketable.
