Our universe is expanding. This year, scientists from the University of California estimated that for every 3.3 million light years from Earth, the universe is growing at 73.3km a second. Translation: very fast.
This should be just fast enough to keep pace with the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). This cinematic juggernaut, which began with Iron Man in 2008, has grossed $23.7 billion over the course of 26 films, more than double the next best-performing franchise, Star Wars. It has at least 27 more projects set for the next few years, putting this film universe on course for seemingly unstoppable expansion.
I can sense the highbrow among you zoning out. But if, over Christmas dinner, the young people in your life start talking about Marvel’s latest Spider-Man offering, which has sold more advance tickets than any film in UK history, you need to be up to speed. Marvel is a giant of modern culture, after all. Such is its influence, this is the second consecutive year that a child in the UK has been named Thanos (who, in the films, is a purple, genocidal warlord with a chin that looks like a wrinkled testicle — good luck to those children).
In Spider-Man: No Way Home, released this week, the webslinger inadvertently breaks open what is known as the “multiverse”, which opens the door to other realities. Tom Holland, who plays Spider-Man, has dubbed it “the most ambitious standalone superhero movie ever” and “the start of a multiverse of possibilities”. Let me explain.
This term — multiverse — marks a leap forward for Marvel. So far, it has followed the shared cinematic universe model it spearheaded in the mid-2000s, in which a number of films that exist in the same world feed into an overarching narrative. One such Marvel narrative concluded in 2019 with Avengers: Endgame, where dozens of heroes from previous MCU films came together. This model has, to a certain extent, disproved William Goldman’s “Nobody knows anything” maxim about how to make a successful film, and has become the go-to formula for producing profitable cinema with a virtually guaranteed audience.
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The multiverse, however, is a way for Marvel to expand further. In scientific circles, the multiverse theory posits that we are one of an infinite number of alternative universes. As a piece of cinematic engineering, it gives Marvel scope to grow and to even pull other film franchises into its orbit, franchises that exist within “alternate universes”. Still with me?
For instance, although Spider-Man: No Way Home will take place within the MCU, there are set to be appearances from villains (and possibly heroes) from earlier Spider-Man franchises: Willem Dafoe and Alfred Molina played Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus in Sam Raimi’s trilogy (2002-2007), and Rhys Ifans and Jamie Foxx played Lizard and Electro in Marc Webb’s two films (2012-2014).
“The multiverse means that [Marvel] can essentially salvage the best bits from any other project going and kind of jettison the rest,” says Helen O’Hara, film critic and host of the Empire Film Podcast.
“But, to quote Spider-Man himself, ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. It’s a question of how they use the multiverse, what happens with it in terms of storytelling. My big caution with it is you risk getting to a point where people are not as engaged with these films as, say, you or me, and end up feeling completely alienated.”
The multiverse originated in the Marvel comic books from which these films draw inspiration (although rival comics giant DC established the concept earlier in The Flash No 123 in 1961, and even then some geeks would say it was introduced in the pages of Wonder Woman in 1953). Starting in 1977, dozens of alternative versions of characters such as Spider-Man, including an anthropomorphic pig (Spider-Ham), make creative possibilities practically endless. To borrow the words of Stan Lee, one of the main forces behind Marvel Comics’ success, this presents a “world of limitless dimensions”.
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It does, however, mean you would have to set aside an unhealthy amount of time to follow every universe-hopping narrative. Fortunately for us, one man did just that. Douglas Wolk, an Oregon-based author and journalist, ploughed through the 27,000 Marvel comics published since 1961, at one point locking himself in an apartment for 11 days with a case of protein drinks to do so.
“The comics, like the movies, are made for pleasure and enjoyment more than anything else,” he says. “They are not made for obsessive cultists, nor are they this torturous thing you have to experience in its entirety.”
Wolk documented this reading odyssey in his new book, All of the Marvels, in which he reassures us that “no creator expects that their readers are familiar with the whole Marvel story to date”. Aristotle would surely agree, given that one of his decrees about the nature of a plot is that it “should have a certain length, and this should be such as can readily be held in memory”. A cinematic multiverse runs the risk of breaking this rule, and becoming too overwhelming for audiences to comprehend.
“Equally though, you have something like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which is arguably the greatest superhero movie ever made,” O’Hara says. This Oscar-winning animated film, released in 2018, is separate from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but was the first to introduce cinema audiences to the concept of the multiverse. Swathes of interdimensional villains and Spider-Men came together in deliberately anarchic fashion, and its success proved that audiences were open to meeting alternative versions of much-loved characters.
By introducing the multiverse into the MCU, Marvel is committing an act of temporal vandalism, blowing up the neat narrative continuity it has established thus far. But it is not surprising that this is the moment it has chosen to do so. The last few years have seen the decline of monoculture — the idea of everyone engaging with the same content. The titans of monoculture, such as Marvel and Star Wars, have recently concluded hugely popular cinematic narrative arcs. Hastened by the pandemic, they have moved towards television streaming to grow their respective franchises, something that Bob Chapek, the chief executive of Disney, insisted “was going to happen anyway”. Marvel is the first to harness the creative possibilities of the multiverse to embrace this new era where everyone is watching different things. Consider the myriad of television series and films it allows it to produce, unshackled from the lore set down by its previous films, and by extension the sheer volume of people it can reach.
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As well as a creative paradise, the multiverse is a sturdy money-making strategy. This new Spider-Man film is rumoured to provide the groundwork for a number of related spin-offs, all of which are likely to rake in the cash. But this strategy will surely embolden those who criticise the hegemony of Marvel and its impact on cinema. In a lecture given in 2020 via the Belgian film magazine Sabzian, the director Olivier Assayas said: “Why take the trouble to finance a film that is not meant to provoke a sequel, a spin-off, or another film ‘in the universe of’ and whose unsure relationship with the public is unpredictable?
Assayas is not alone in his disapproval. Martin Scorsese compared Marvel films to theme parks. Jane Campion, the director of The Power of the Dog, was somewhat more damning. “I hate them,” she said. “They’re so noisy and ridiculous . . . I feel like it must come from pantomime.”
In fairness to Campion, the films’ audiences are notably raucous, and this time around nostalgic fans are sure to go wild when they witness the return of much-loved villains last seen nearly 20 years ago.
The Marvel multiverse is a prime vehicle for indulging such nostalgia, because it allows Marvel to rope in bankable characters of yesteryear under the guise that they’re from “alternate universes”. There are already rumours of Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart reprising their X-Men roles in the upcoming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
However, relying solely on nostalgia is no guarantee of success. The recent Ghostbusters film controversially reanimated the deceased actor Harold Ramis to complete the original line-up. Yet the writers forgot to give any life to the plot.
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Spider-Man: No Way Home may be using the multiverse to tap into fan’s desire for past glories, but it has a secret weapon to avoid becoming a mere nostalgia-fest — Spider-Man himself. Tom Holland is a formidable screen presence and brings a youthful vulnerability to the character. And the character itself is not mere blockbuster fodder: the director James Cameron recently said that he saw Spider-Man as “a metaphor for puberty and all the changes to your body, your anxieties about society, your relationships with your gender of choice”. Plus, dress anything up with enough aerial acrobatics and it’s bound to be entertaining.
That said, there is a lot riding on this film. Its use of the multiverse could be the key to Marvel’s future as a franchise. But given that science suggests that our universe will eventually expand to such an extent that it becomes unable to sustain life, Marvel must work hard to prove that its expansion is not doomed to the same fate.
Spider-Man: No Way Home is released in cinemas today
