Fans are always speculating where the MCU started going off the rails, and my hot take is that the multiverse was the beginning of the end. Marvel leaned into a fun gimmick, but they effectively fumbled their handling of the multiverse, something that becomes quite clear when you compare it to other franchises.
The now-forgotten sci-fi show Sliders practically wrote the book on how to handle multiverses, using its dimension-hopping premise to constantly explore and grow its characters. After watching just a few episodes of this classic show, even the most diehard Marvel fan will admit that Kevin Feige completely botched his handling of the multiverse.
The Best Sci-Fi Show You Never Watched
If you’ve never watched Sliders, here’s the premise: a brilliant young man invents the ability to travel (or “slide”) into parallel dimensions, but he and his friends effectively get stranded in the multiverse. They can’t travel directly back to their home dimension and must wait for the sliding vortex to open, hoping that the next trip will finally bring them home.
Every new dimension presents bizarre challenges that threaten to keep them from entering the vortex. If they don’t slide at the right time, they will then be stuck in a parallel Earth with no way of ever getting back home.
The season 1 cast of Sliders
While the quality of Sliders admittedly dropped off over time, the first two seasons should be mandatory viewing for sci-fi fans. The show uses its premise to seriously explore these different dimensions and what happened (like America losing the Revolutionary War) to make this reality so different from the one we know. Our characters almost always run into parallel versions of themselves, seeing firsthand how they might have turned out if they had been born in another time and place.
Feige Fumbles, Fans Falter
What does all this Sliders info have to do with Marvel fumbling the multiverse? Unlike Sliders, the MCU never really explored the actual alternate universes in live-action; instead, it focused more on using the multiverse concept to explore gimmicks like “what if Peggy Carter was Captain America” or “what if Jim from The Office was actually Mr. Fantastic?” These gimmicks could be fun at times, but they are almost never used to grow our characters meaningfully.
For example, what do almost all of the multiversal characters in Spider-Man: No Way Home, Deadpool & Wolverine, and Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness have in common? Simple: they are new faces for familiar characters to fight. And to be blunt, this gave the writers an excuse to never really develop any villains, instead throwing remixed versions of recognizable characters into films like palette-swapped video game villains for one-dimensional protagonists to fight.
This is especially true for Deadpool & Wolverine, one of Marvel’s most successful films. We don’t get to truly explore any cool multiverses, Sliders-style; instead, we are just presented with a weird Wasteland of characters from the old Fox Marvel movies.
Trips to other multiverses are mostly used for visual gags (like all those different versions of Wolverine). We spend so little time learning about the alternate Logan’s 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 of Meh
That’s because, deep down, Marvel writers don’t care about exploring new versions of characters, and they were focused on making a Wolverine that was exactly the same as the one we know, but with a vaguely traumatic background. They wanted a familiar face onscreen again, like the writers of Spider-Man: No Way Home wanted familiar foes. All this nerdy nostalgia bait effectively stagnated this cinematic universe because it was no longer building a future for itself but was instead stripmining its own creative legacy, one multiversal movie at a time.
Marvel had the opportunity to do what Sliders 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 stuck in the Fox universe in No Way Home instead of the Fox villains getting stuck in the MCU? Peter Parker would have learned infinitely more about himself and all his roads less traveled, even as he got more screentime with the Tobey Maguire version of Spider-Man.
What If… Marvel Had Good Writing?
What if Doctor Strange had spent extended time in the Illuminati’s parallel world, learning more about why they were formed and what global events necessitated the formation of this secretive cabal? This would effectively continue the themes of Civil War and other Marvel movies that pondered the dangers of heroes having too much unilateral power, all while forcing Doctor Strange to consider if he has a moral duty to keep this group from forming in his own world.
What if Deadpool spent extensive time in an alternate Wolverine’s 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 (about whether or not he would become a hero, like Colossus recommends) and even fleshed out his desire to be in the hero-filled world of the MCU.
Is It Too Late To Save the MCU?
These are the kinds 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 & Wolverine), they hurt Marvel in the long run by emphasizing to audiences 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 Endgame), or just appear for two seconds and meaninglessly die (like all of the Illuminati).
This led to the superhero fatigue that now threatens to destroy the entire comic movie industry. Marvel could have simply copied the Sliders formula, and the multiverse would have reinvigorated this franchise; now, though, Disney is gambling everything on the upcoming MCU reset, and the studio that refused to truly explore the multiverse is now turning the most famous franchise in the world into one big Variant. But unless Marvel can start delivering better writing than a low-budget, dimension-hopping show from the mid-90s, it may be too late to save the most famous franchise in the world.
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