Why Hollywood is obsessed with the multiverse

IN HOLLYWOOD’S LATEST superhero blockbuster, “The Flash” (pictured), the title character (played by Ezra Miller) can run faster than the speed of light. This, he discovers, enables him to go back in time and change the past. Some superheroes in this situation might have taken the opportunity to kill Adolf Hitler or any other dictator, but the Flash has a more modest, personal goal: he will save his mother from being murdered when he was a boy.

As everyone who has ever seen a time-travel film might expect, this turns out to be a complicated matter. The Flash finds himself trapped in an alternate reality populated by different versions of the people he knows, including his own younger self. This conundrum prompts further sprints into the past and further visits to alternate realities.

Perhaps in some universe or other, “The Flash” has a fascinatingly original plot; in this realm, however, it is the second superhero movie in a month to feature someone flitting between dimensions. Both “The Flash” and “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” are built on the notion that superheroes shouldn’t confine themselves to one universe when there is a whole multiverse out there to explore.

Nor are these the only recent films to riff on this concept. The trend was started by a cartoon, “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” (2018), and was followed by “Spider-Man: No Way Home” (2021, pictured below), “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” (2022), and the Oscar-winning “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (2022), not to mention various Marvel and DC television series. There may be countless universes, but there appears to be a limited number of fresh ideas.

Cinema’s current fixation on the multiverse can be traced back to superhero films’ source material. For decades, Marvel and DC comics have employed multiple realities to explain away continuity errors and put old characters into new settings. The trend is also a matter of inflation: after you have saved the universe, as Marvel’s superheroes did in “Avengers: Endgame” (2019), what is left to do but save several universes at once?

The premise can be off-putting: it is difficult to care about a character’s death in one world once a film has established that they’re alive and well in another. But at their best, multiversal films ruminate on the roads not taken and the other lives characters might have had. It was this wistful philosophical aspect that helped “Everything Everywhere All at Once” win plaudits.

The appeal of such films isn’t always so high-minded. From a studio’s perspective, the multiverse provides a cost-effective way to dust off their old intellectual property and exploit viewers’ nostalgic fondness for earlier incarnations of overused characters. A trilogy of Spider-Man films starring Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man, ran its course in 2007, and two Spider-Man films starring Andrew Garfield came to an underwhelming conclusion in 2014. But when Messrs Maguire and Garfield returned as alternate Peter Parkers alongside the incumbent, Tom Holland, fans were thrilled by the buy-one-get-two-free offer. “Spider-Man: No Way Home” became the highest grossing film of 2021.

Similarly, the marketing of “The Flash” has focused on the inclusion of two separate Batmans (or Batmen). Michael Keaton played the character in two films by Tim Burton, “Batman” (1989) and “Batman Returns” (1992); Ben Affleck played him in “Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice” (2016) and “Justice League” (2017). A new solo outing for either of them would have been a risky investment, but the multiverse concept allows them to guest-star in someone else’s film. It also allows viewers to see the vintage Batmobile from 1989 once again.

As fun as this can be, even the most devoted Bat-fan might feel dispirited. After all, when a film opens the door to infinite universes, shouldn’t they contain something more mind-boggling than Mr Keaton, a septuagenarian, putting on his black rubber mask and trotting out his familiar catchphrases? The finale of “The Flash” has a crowd of different Supermen; the finale of “Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse” has a crowd of different Spider-People. Both scenes can be read as admissions that this is what superhero blockbusters have come to: variations of the same characters in the same scenarios, over and over again. ■