Multiverses are a known part of most comics canons that allow for experimentation with familiar characters, new settings, and multi-dimensional threats. And given how long the Marvel Cinematic Universe plans to be at this mega blockbuster business, expanding into the multiverse might be inevitable—especially if they want to keep broadening their list of characters.
But can the films really support that?
The reason for expanding the MCU into a multiverse should be obvious enough—due to various mergers, Marvel and Disney now have a heap of characters at their fingertips that they’re keen to use, primarily the X-Men. While there are plenty of ways to make that convergence happen, a multiverse requires very little explanation, at least at the forefront. Mutants simply show up when there’s a strange leak between universes. Maybe a little pocket of dimensional weirdness drops Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters right next to the Avengers compound (they’re both in upstate New York, after all).
On the other hand, Marvel has had a hard time keeping one universe cogent. After Endgame’s decision to explain-yet-handily-not-explain time travel to a satisfying end, the writers of the screenplay and directors of the film had differing view points on whether or not Steve Rogers landed in an alternate universe in his final trip to the past. So that’s one branch of the multiverse that already lives in a constant state of confusion.
Marvel insisted that they could loop television in with their sprawling film franchise, and they have plans to continue down this road with WandaVision, Loki, and Falcon and the Winter Soldier on the upcoming Disney+ platform. But the Marvel Netflix shows and even Agents of SHIELD had a hard time coexisting with the ever-expanding spiral of the MCU. Agents of SHIELD did better by having a few events that linked up directly with the plots twists from films (the Hydra reveal provided an interesting wrinkle for the series), but eventually lost sight of the general MCU plot. It was inevitable as the show gained its own momentum and needed to break from fealty to the MCU’s mega-arcs in order to do anything unique.
Daredevil, Luke Cage, and Jessica Jones all did their best to link up with the MCU when they premiered, but that veneer quickly fell away. If the shows are to be believed, New York City recovered quite rapidly from the major battle in Avengers—the shows only paid lip service to the larger schemes afoot with occasional mentions of Captain America or Hulk. More than anything, the Marvel Netflix ‘verse (including The Punisher and Iron Fist) felt like a place where superheroes were a little less surprising. There seemed to be more of them around every corner, and the larger world-threatening cycles were rarely commented on by New York’s street heroes. This became even more obvious in the final seasons of Daredevil and Jessica Jones, which should have made it more clear as to when they took place in order to avoid commenting on the Thanos’s “Snapture”… but both shows avoided the question entirely, taking place in some timeless year where nothing is affected by the outside world.
With the WandaVision and Loki shows set to involve a certain amount of time travel (WandaVision is headed for the 1950s and Loki is supposed to be time-hopping to his heart’s content), everything starts to get even muddier. We were told in Endgame that going back in time and changing things does not lead to splits in the timeline, but then that means that whatever these shows do has to lineup with what the MCU has ostensibly already done. As the universe expands, that will be a much harder task to manage, a task that Marvel already seems barely invested in. Even the simplest questions—does the MCU have a similar political timeline to our own Earth?—aren’t routinely checked and noted. Which is how Iron Man 3 can have a completely fictional president, but a character in Luke Cage has a picture of Barack Obama in their office when he likely would have been president at the same time as IM3‘s President Ellis.
The same can be said of Wakanda’s integration into the larger MCU; while Marvel had the perfect excuse in Black Panther, with Wakanda having isolated itself from the rest of the world for centuries, that seal has been broken now. Given their level of technology and pledge to help the world, the audience should be seeing Wakandan characters cropping up in nearly every MCU story, or at the very least evidence of their presence in relief efforts around the world. This gets even more woolly when considering a post-Endgame society, where the entire globe has been devastated by the absence of half the population for five whole years. But we’ll probably be expected to shrug that off as well, and only expect to see more of Wakanda in Black Panther 2.
If this is how the MCU’s sense of continuity within a single universe is already being treated, is a multiverse possible at all? Perhaps. But a better form of record-keeping is clearly needed if all of these new stories are going to continue to jive under the same banner.
It’s strange to think it, but maybe one of the best possible ways of organizing all of this information would be through a centralized hub. While a film series wouldn’t do the trick, having a television show where one group actually kept track of the multiverse and its possibilities would help prevent the MCU from from descending into incoherent time-space mush. Such a show wouldn’t have to be high on action, just thoughtful, maybe on the humorous side, but with a lot of heart and care toward the mechanics of story and worldbuilding. There are plenty of crews in the Marvel universe who could fit that bill, but the first that comes to mind is the Fantastic 4. Which Marvel now has the rights to, thanks to the Disney/Fox merger.
Just think. A show where Reed Richards stares at a multiverse tracking computer all day and tries to avert multidimensional disasters. Sue is constantly explaining how the multiverse is ticking along to Johnny and Ben, who don’t really care much about it, and only get excited when they have to be a little more hands on to save the day. It would be a fun way to utilize an iconic team that would probably just clutter up the filmscape.
That, plus the addition of a more robust mythkeeping team (sort of like the one Star Wars has) could help stabilize the Marvel Cinematic Universe well enough to create a satisfying multiverse. If Marvel wanted to put the time in, they could really hold the reins to the most meticulous multimedia storytelling venture of all time. But they’ll have to commit to keeping track of it in order to win that particular game.
Emmet Asher-Perrin would really love that Fantastic 4 show, hook me up, Marvel. You can bug him on Twitter, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
I for one was very happy to see the Netflix Marvel series ignore a bunch of overwrought and inconsistent canon which would have added nothing to the shows. I considered them as basically independent shows about individual superheroes essentially set in our world – or at least the typical fantasy world of techno-thrillers and cape shows, and they worked well in that mode. There might have been the odd mention of alien invasions and such-like, but these things had no reality in the series – forgotten like the residents of Sunnydale have forgotten last week’s monster. They couldn’t have told the stories they were telling were it otherwise.
multi-universe, of course, will be exciting
“We were told in Endgame that going back in time and changing things does not lead to splits in the timeline…”
It’s my understanding that they explained this is exactly what happens, unless I’ve misunderstood your phrasing. Going back in time can’t change your present but changing things in the past will spawn new branches, though this was something they wanted to avoid. Hence Cap’s comment about ‘trimming those branches’ or whatever exactly he said. I’m not entirely clear on why having alternate branches would be a bad thing and I honestly don’t know how he’s going to do anything about a past in which Loki escaped or Thanos disappeared out of his timeline before Guardians of the Galaxy really got going. Not to mention lots of potential little ripples that things like Tony talking to his dad or them stealing Pym particles could spawn.
Hadn’t considered a FF streaming series, but I like the idea. I’ve been wanting a good adaptation for a long time. Maybe a series is better than trying for another cinematic interpretation. But then they’d miss out on some of the upcoming movie cosmic stuff that they are suited for: Eternals, Celestials…
@3 Split time-lines with each change is exactly how the Russos explained it with Cap starting a new timeline when he stayed in the past. However, for some reason, some people including a bunch of writers here refuse to accept the Russos as geek canon providers. Shrug.
One problem with AGENTS OF SHIELD is that the poor show’s seasons are moved about at the whim of ABC so there’s no way to keep it relevent to the movie universe. On top of that, the secrecy involved in the movie plots would make the TV show a major leak source so it’s better to keep them separate.
That’s a genuinely awesome idea for an FF tv series — and for a use of the FF in the MCU, and for a TV series in the MCU. Dang. You know anyone who knows anyone who could get you in to pitch it to Feige?
Multiverse is the only way a lot of the MCU works. For example, Iron Man fighting the Mandarin in Iron Man 3, Where are the other Avengers? Is Cap busy? You gonna try telling me that a worldwide terror threat isn’t gonna bring Cap in?
Same can be said of any of the other standalone movies. Where are the other Avengers? Thor is the only one with a viable excuse, since he lives on another planet.
All of these Avengers can’t be on the same Earth at the same time.
@7 You’re describing a problem that isn’t a problem. Comics have been doing this for nearly a century, so where are the complaints there? People are taking these movies way too seriously when they try to apply real-world logic to them.
@7 Spiderman: FFH kinda highlights that problem, (I’m pretty sure this scene is in a trailer) when Peter asks Fury why one of the other Avengers can’t be called, he goes through Thor, Dr. Strange, and Captain Marvel, and comes up with extremely vague reasons why they can’t help, but as we’ve just seen in Endgame, there are a whole bunch of other heroes they could ask, and this is literally about the end of the world. The elemental threat seems like it would be right up Scarlet Witch’s ally, and isn’t there a brand-new Captain America that probably wants to prove himself?
@9 And they’ll have to improve their excuses for subsequent films or limit the stakes but it works for Spidey. Partly because of Fury but also because Peter is still quite inexperienced and lacking the confidence to challenge someone like Fury. He makes the token effort but doesn’t follow through.
Given that DC’s Multiverse devolved into a huge spaghetti mess (seriously, just look at Wikipedia’s list) requiring The Crises of Infinite Retcons, I wouldn’t recommend it. Don’t try to make canon internally consistent.
IMHO, a multiverse is usually a story-management crutch.
At a minimum, we expect a single story (i.e., a bounded work with a single creative team) to be internally consistent. If it breaks a promise, the audience complains.
Things get more complicated with a multi-part saga that aspires to be a single story, because multiple creative teams have to coordinate. If Team 4 says “it would be cool if …” and it contradicts what Team 1 established, somebody needs to say “no”, or provide a patch (“retcon”), or at least signal their awareness to the audience (“hang a lantern on it” — often conflated with “to lampshade”).
Leader Desslok died when his ship exploded. No he didn’t! Because he triggered a warp just before the weapon’s impact, he was thrown into space, then retrieved and revived by the Comet Empire.
Taking the stance that all the stories “exist” “somewhere” is a category error, then you add a dash of physics (does “parallel universe” sound science-o-tronic enough?), and eventually you go pathological, like Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast.
Only if your characters with divergent histories happen to meet, does the grandiose name “multiverse” pertain. Otherwise (and this is the simplest, least-agitating take) it’s just different arrangements of the same story-atoms (character, setting, plot, props); for example, nobody expects the zillion interpretations of Shakespeare to somehow be connected. (Ophelia was blonde but is now a brunette? How did that happen?) We need a term for that. “Isomeric stories”, maybe?