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By Chris Snellgrove | Published
Fans are always speculating where the MCU started to go off the rails, and my opinion is that the multiverse was the beginning of the end. Marvel went for a fun gimmick, but they effectively failed in their handling of the multiverse, something that’s pretty clear when you compare it to other franchises.
The Now Forgotten Sci-Fi Show Sliders He practically wrote the book on how to handle multiverses, using his dimension-hopping premise to constantly explore and grow his characters. After watching just a few episodes of this classic show, even the most die-hard Marvel fan will admit that Kevin Feige completely screwed up his handling of the multiverse.
The best sci-fi show you never saw
If you have never seen SlidersHere’s the premise: a brilliant young man invents the ability to travel (or “slip”) into parallel dimensions, but he and his friends are effectively stranded in the multiverse. They cannot travel directly back to their home dimension and must wait for the sliding vortex to open, hoping that the next journey will finally take them home.
Each new dimension presents strange challenges that threaten to prevent them from entering the vortex. If they don’t slip at the right time, they will be trapped on a parallel Earth with no way to return home.
While the quality of Sliders Admittedly it diminished over time, the first two seasons should be required viewing for sci-fi fans. The show uses its premise to seriously explore these different dimensions and what happened (like the United States losing the Revolutionary War) to make this reality so different from the one we know. Our characters almost always encounter parallel versions of themselves, seeing firsthand what they would have been like if they had been born in another time and place.
Feige fumbles, fans miss
What does all this mean? Sliders Does the information have to do with Marvel torpedoing the multiverse? Unlike Sliders, the MCU never really explored actual alternate universes in live-action; instead, it focused more on using the multiverse concept to explore tricks like “what if Peggy Carter was Captain America” or “what if Jim from The Office was actually Mr. Fantastic?” These tricks can be fun at times, but they are almost never used to grow our characters in any meaningful way.
For example, what do almost all of the multiversal characters in Spider-Man: No Way Home, Deadpool and Wolverineand Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness do they have in common? Simple: they are new faces against which well-known characters fight. And to be frank, this gave the writers an excuse to never develop villains, but instead release remixed versions of recognizable movie characters as palette-swapped video game villains for one-dimensional protagonists to fight.
This is especially true for Deadpool and Wolverineone of Marvel’s most successful films. We can’t really explore any cool multiverse, Sliders-style; instead, we’re simply presented with a strange Wasteland of characters from the old Fox Marvel movies.
The trips to other multiverses are mostly used for visual gags (like all those different versions of Wolverine). We spent so little time learning about Logan’s alternate universe that to this day, fans aren’t sure why the world hates him for “letting” the X-Men (mutants hated and feared by the world!) die.
Marvel and the Multiverse by Meh
This is because, deep down, Marvel’s writers don’t care about exploring new versions of characters, and they focused on making a Wolverine who was exactly the same as the one we know, but with a vaguely traumatic backstory. They wanted to see a familiar face on screen again, like the writers of Spider-Man: No Way Home I wanted familiar enemies. All this nerd nostalgia bait effectively stalled this cinematic universe because it was no longer building a future for itself, but was instead stripping away its own creative legacy, one multiversal film at a time.
Marvel had the opportunity to do what Sliders it did, allowing familiar characters to visit parallel worlds and learn something about themselves. For example, how wild would it have been if Spider-Man had been trapped in the Fox universe in No way home Instead of Fox’s villains being stuck in the MCU? Peter Parker would have learned infinitely more about himself and all his paths less traveled, even when he had more screen time with Tobey Maguire’s version of Spider-Man.
What if…Marvel had good writing?
What if Doctor Strange had spent a lot of time in the parallel world of the Illuminati, learning more about why they formed and what global events required the formation of this secret cabal? This would effectively continue the themes of Civil war and other Marvel films that pondered the dangers of heroes having too much unilateral power, while also forcing Doctor Strange to consider whether he has a moral duty to prevent this group from forming in his own world.
What if Deadpool spent a lot of time in Wolverine’s alternate world, learning more about the importance of being a hero in a world where his heroes, the X-Men, are dead? This would have continued his arc from the first two Deadpool movies (concerning whether or not he would become a hero, as Colossus recommends) and even developed his desire to be in the hero-filled world of the MCU.
Is it too late to save the MCU?
These are the types of stories Sliders gave us every week in the ’90s on a shoestring budget, but Marvel can’t give us such fully developed stories in movies that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. While some of these multiversal films were successful (especially No way home and Deadpool and Wolverine), hurt Marvel in the long run by emphasizing to the public that nothing really matters. Stories are meaningless when characters can just hit the reset button (like Spider-Man making everyone forget who he is), come back from the dead (like Loki in end of the game), or just appear for two seconds and die senselessly (like all the Illuminati).
This led to superhero fatigue that now threatens to destroy the entire comedy film industry. Marvel could have simply copied the Sliders formula, and the multiverse would have revitalized this franchise; Now, however, Disney is going all-in on the upcoming MCU reboot, and the studio that refused to really explore the multiverse is now turning the world’s most famous franchise into a major spinoff. But unless Marvel can start delivering better scripts than a low-budget, dimension-hopping show from the mid-’90s, it may be too late to save the world’s most famous franchise.
