Author: Chris Snelgrove Published
Fans are always speculating about where the Marvel Universe began to go off the rails, and my popular belief is that the multiverse is the beginning of the end. Marvel leans into a fun gimmick, but they ham-fist the multiverse effectively, which becomes very obvious when you compare it to other franchises.
Now Forgotten Sci-Fi Shows slider actually wrote a book about how it dealt with the multiverse, using its interdimensional premise to continually explore and develop its characters. After watching a few episodes of this classic series, even the most die-hard Marvel fans will admit that Kevin Feige’s handling of the multiverse is completely terrible.
The best sci-fi show you’ve never seen
if you have never seen sliderhere’s the premise: A brilliant young man invents the ability to travel (or “glide”) to parallel dimensions, but he and his friends are actually trapped in the multiverse. They cannot return directly to their home dimension and must wait for the sliding vortex to open in the hope that the next trip will eventually take them home.
Each new dimension brings strange challenges that threaten to send them into a vortex. If they don’t taxi at the right time, they’ll be stranded on a parallel Earth with no way to get home.
Although the quality slider There’s no denying that over time, the first two seasons should be must-sees for sci-fi fans. The show uses its premise to carefully explore these different dimensions and what happened (like the United States losing the Revolutionary War) that made this reality so different from the one we know. Our characters almost always encounter parallel versions of themselves, witnessing firsthand what they would have become if they were born in another time and place.
Fitch made a mistake and fans were shaken
what does all this do slider Is the information relevant to Marvel’s exploration of the multiverse? Unlike Slider, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has never really explored an actual parallel universe in a live-action movie. Instead, it’s more focused on using multiverse concepts to explore gimmicks like “What if Peggy Carter was Captain America” or “What if Jim from The Office was actually Mr. Fantastic?” These gimmicks can be fun at times, but they’re almost never used to meaningfully develop our characters.
For example, what do almost all multiverse characters do? Spider-Man: No Way Home, deadpool and wolverineand Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness Is there anything in common? It’s simple: they’re new faces to familiar characters. Frankly, this gives the writers an excuse to never actually develop any villains and instead throw hybrid versions of recognizable characters into the movie, like palette-swapped video game villains for one-dimensional protagonists to fight.
This is especially true for deadpool and wolverineone of Marvel’s most successful movies. We can’t really explore any of the cool multiverses, slider-style; instead, all we see is a weird wasteland of characters from old Fox Marvel movies.
The trips to other multiverses are mostly used for visual gags (like all the different versions of Wolverine). We spent so little time learning about Logan’s alternate universe that, to this day, fans are still unsure why the world hated him for “letting” the X-Men (mutants hated and feared by the world!) die.
Marvel and the Multiverse of Meh
That’s because, deep down, Marvel writers don’t care about exploring new versions of the character, they’re focused on making a Wolverine that’s exactly like the one we know, but with a vaguely traumatic background. They hope that a familiar face will appear on the screen again, just like ” Spider-Man: No Way Home Want familiar enemies. All this nerdy nostalgia-baiting has effectively stagnated this cinematic universe, because instead of building a future for itself, it’s robbing itself of its own creative legacy, one diverse movie at a time.
What does Marvel have the opportunity to do? slider did it, allowing familiar characters to visit parallel worlds and learn about themselves. For example, how crazy would it be if Spider-Man was trapped in the Fox universe? No way home Instead of Fox villains being trapped in the Marvel Universe? Even if Peter Parker gets more screen time in Tobey Maguire’s version of Spider-Man, he’ll learn a lot more about himself and all of his beaten paths.
What if…Marvel had a good script?
What if Doctor Strange spent a long time in the Illuminati’s parallel world, learning more about why they were formed and what global events necessitated the creation of this secret cabal? This will effectively continue the theme civil war and other Marvel films ponder the dangers of heroes having too much unilateral power, while forcing Doctor Strange to consider whether he has a moral obligation to prevent this group from forming in his own world.
What if Deadpool spent a lot of time in an alternate Wolverine world, learning more about the importance of being a hero in a world where his heroes, the X-Men, are dead? This would continue his trajectory from the first two Deadpool movies (in terms of whether he would become a hero as Colossus suggested), and even flesh out his desire to enter the Marvel Universe’s world of heroes.
Is it too late to save the MCU?
These are the types of stories slider In the ’90s, Marvel was giving us something on a shoestring budget every week, but Marvel couldn’t give us such a mature story in a movie that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. While some of these multiverse movies have been successful (especially No way home and deadpool and wolverine), they hurt Marvel in the long run by emphasizing to the audience that nothing really matters. When a character can hit the reset button (like Spider-Man and make everyone forget who he is) and rise from the dead (like Loki in Loki), the story just doesn’t make sense. endgame), or just appear for two seconds and then die pointlessly (like all Illuminati do).
This has led to superhero fatigue, which now threatens to destroy the entire comic book movie industry. Marvel could simply copy slider formula, the multiverse would reinvigorate the series; now, however, Disney is betting everything on the upcoming MCU reset, and the studio that refused to truly explore the multiverse is now turning the world’s most famous series into a big one. But unless Marvel can start delivering better scripts than the low-budget, inter-dimensional dramas of the mid-’90s, it may be too late to save the world’s most famous franchise.
