Franchise movie-making is a little like quantum physics. It begins with one simple event, but things rapidly splurge out into a complicated mess that very few people will ever really understand: the laws of the universe, say, or the Terminator franchise. Mere sequels are no longer enough in the franchise game; now, it’s all about universes.
Rather than travelling in a chronological line from one movie to the next, the idea is to build a fictional realm where you can move in any direction, branching out in an endless succession of sequels, prequels, reboots, spin-offs and connected crossovers. This is all great news for diehard fans, but civilian punters now face either an online refresher course or utter confusion every time they enter the multiplex.
For example, when in Marvel’s timeline does Black Widow take place? After Captain America: Civil War and before Avengers: Endgame? What about Star Wars’ The Mandalorian? Is that set before or after The Force Awakens? Who’s The Joker right now? Is it Joaquin Phoenix, who recently won an Oscar in, er, The Joker? Or is it Jared Leto, as seen in Zack Snyder’s Justice League and, before that, 2016’s superhero team-up Suicide Squad? Leto’s Joker is not in the new movie The Suicide Squad, which is not a sequel to Suicide Squad, though Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn is in both Suicide Squad movies. It’s a good job Erwin Schrödinger didn’t live to see this.
The bad news is it’s going to get worse. The big movie players have been spending fortunes acquiring known brands and characters, and they’re sure as hell going to milk them for all they’re worth. That means more sequels, prequels, spin-offs and crossovers, and more head-scratching would-be fans.
Universe-building has its pitfalls, though. Some attempts fall at the first hurdle, such as Universal’s “Dark Universe”, rebooting the studio’s classic horror characters. It was announced with great fanfare in 2017, then quietly binned after Tom Cruise’s Mummy reboot bombed. Others have tied themselves in knots. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, for example, was set in 1927 and featured a young Minerva McGonagall – a nice bit of continuity with the Harry Potter movies yet to come, you might think. Except, according to Potter-world’s own chronology, McGonagall was born in 1935; she wouldn’t have been alive in 1927. Quick, get out the Time-Turner!
It is not just big sci-fi and comic-book stories that must wrangle with these problems but also long-running horror ones such as Saw, whose convoluted, flashback-laden saga would require a very large whiteboard to explain, and Halloween. (The 2018 Halloween, despite being the 11th movie, was essentially a sequel to the 1978 original and ignored all the sequels in between.) When Disney bought the Star Wars franchise in 2012, it had to establish a special task force whose job it was to wrangle half a century’s worth of Star Wars movies, TV series, cartoons, Holiday Specials etc into one definitive timeline, or “canon”. The only way to do it was to separate out a chunk of stories (including the six existing movies) as canon, then shunt the rest of the stuff into a separate category known as Star Wars Legends, which was really a way of saying: “This stuff never really happened”.
This is nothing new; they basically did the same thing with the Bible, dismissing certain gospels as apocryphal, or non-canon, and excluding them from the Extended Jesus Universe (as they never called it). The other strategy is “retconning”, as in “retroactive continuity” – going back and tweaking existing storylines. Again, this is nothing new: Arthur Conan Doyle did it with Sherlock Holmes, retconning Holmes’s death at the Reichenbach Falls 10 years later to say Holmes actually survived, so as to continue the Extended Holmes Universe (as he never called it).
There has been one glaring exception to this rule, however: Marvel, which has successfully strung together a saga of 23 or so highly popular movies culminating in Avengers: Endgame, with little need for awkward retconning or other fixes (Black Widow aside). This level of planning, coherence and ambition is unprecedented in the history of movies.
While the rest play catch-up, Marvel is still one step ahead. Now it is thinking beyond mere universes to the concept of the multiverse. Again, a background in quantum physics is helpful. The multiverse theory hangs on the premise that every event creates a new universe, slightly different from the one where that event didn’t happen. So new parallel universes are springing up all the time. From a franchise point of view this is very convenient. Now, if your story doesn’t fit with the canon you can say: “This stuff did happen, but in a different universe.”
Marvel didn’t invent the multiverse concept; it has been widely explored in science fiction such as Doctor Who and Star Trek or, more recently, Rick and Morty, or even romcoms such as Sliding Doors. But Marvel had already figured much of this stuff out in its comic books. According to legend, in 1981, Dave Thorpe, a British writer on Marvel UK’s comic book Captain Britain, coined the term “Earth-616” to describe Marvel’s baseline universe – the one where all the Marvel movies take place, roughly corresponding to our own reality. There are other numbered Earths in the Marvel multiverse where things panned out differently. Miles Morales, the hero of 2018 animated feature Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, is Spider-Man in a different universe: Earth-1610 to be precise. He is joined there by Spider-folk from other universes, including Peter Parker from Earth-616 and “Spider Ham”, the super-powered pig (technically from Earth-8311).
Keen-eyed fans will have already spotted multiverse themes creeping into Marvel’s post-Avengers stories. Recent miniseries Loki served as an induction course in the multiverse concept. Viewers will remember that Tom Hiddleston’s Norse antihero was killed in Avengers: Endgame but, thanks to a bit of time-travel sorcery, an alternative Loki snuck off to some parallel universe. This is the Loki we find in the series, alongside several other Loki “variants” (from other universes), such as those played by Sophia Di Martino, Richard E Grant and a CGI alligator. In Marvel-world, such aberrations are policed by the Time Variance Authority (TVA), so as to preserve the “sacred timeline” and prevent major events that would create new universes. So, in effect, the TVA’s role is analogous to that of the Marvel bosses, deciding what belongs in the canon and what doesn’t. The ending of Loki basically blows up this sacred timeline and opens a can of wormholes, setting the scene for stories to come.
“I think it’s clear that the multiverse is going to play a large role in the next phase of the MCU,” says Marvel producer Brad Winderbaum. Winderbaum was present at a recent Marvel Studios summit meeting to thrash out the rules of the multiverse across forthcoming Marvel stories. “I remember when we were all together and figuring out how the Infinity Stones [the MacGuffins central to the Avengers saga] were going to be seeded [through the films],” he says. “The multiverse meeting that happened a few weeks ago had a very similar quality, where it was a turning point not just in exploration but also figuring out how the arc would work, and how it would culminate and how it would impact the characters. So it was, yeah, it was … incredible, actually.”
Of course, it is all top secret, but expect hints of multiverse themes in Marvel titles to come, including the next Spider-Man, No Way Home (rumoured to be incorporating characters from previous versions of the franchise, including Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus), and next year’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (the title is a bit of a giveaway). This week we got another multiversal offshoot: Marvel’s What If? … This animated series playfully imagines how things might have panned out differently if, say, Peggy Carter became Captain America instead of Steve Rogers, or Black Panther’s T’Challah was in Guardians of the Galaxy. Depending on how you see it, What If? … revels in the “infinite possibilities” of parallel universes, or demonstrates how Marvel and Disney are monetising the brand by spinning out as many side projects as people will swallow.
It isn’t just Marvel; arch-rivals DC Comics actually came up with the multiverse concept first – way back in 1961, in a celebrated edition of The Flash in which Barry Allen (the current Flash) ends up in a parallel universe named Earth-Two, where his predecessor, Jay Garrick (the Flash character from the DC comics of the 1940s), lives. By 1985, DC had worked up its parallel universes into a comic-book series known as Crisis on Infinite Earths, which basically pitched all the imprint’s superheroes into a massive crossover battle against forces destroying all the parallel Earths. Strategically planned across dozens of titles over a number of years, and resulting in the deaths of major characters, it set a new bar for comic-book storytelling – which Marvel has capitalised upon in the movies better than DC itself could.
DC’s multiverse works slightly differently to Marvel’s. In theory, all previous incarnations of DC superheroes such as Superman or Batman exist in parallel universes within the same multiverse. So, presumably, there is no “real” Joker: Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker and Jared Leto’s Joker, and Heath Ledger’s, Jack Nicholson’s and Cesar Romero’s Jokers are all equally real but exist on different Earths. It’s all canon now.
After playing with multiverse concepts in its small-screen series, DC now plans to roll them out across its movies as well. Currently filming in the UK is the movie of The Flash, planned for release next summer. Harking back to the comic books, the story sees Ezra Miller’s Flash travelling between parallel universes with different Bruce Waynes/Batmen. It has been confirmed that Ben Affleck and Michael Keaton have come out of Batman retirement to reprise their old incarnations – all while Robert Pattinson gears up to be the new Batman.
“This movie is a bit of a hinge in the sense that it presents a story that implies a unified universe where all the cinematic iterations that we’ve seen before are valid,” said The Flash director Andy Muschietti recently. “It’s inclusive in the sense that it is saying all that you’ve seen exists, and everything that you will see exists, in the same unified multiverse.”
All this multiverse action could open up new realms of excitement and storytelling ingenuity but, for regular moviegoers, we could be back where we started: in a state of utter confusion as to what’s happening when, where, to whom, and whether any of it actually matters any more.
Fortunately, Marvel has been thinking hard about this. Says Brad Winderbaum: “On the one hand, it’s extremely exciting that all the characters live and breathe in the same universe, now the same multiverse, but you want to make sure that the audience feels as though they can watch any particular project and fully understand and appreciate the story that’s being told on its own terms.”
Let’s see how that works out. If we make it out of the other side of all this, at the very least we should have a better understanding of quantum physics.
What If? … is available on Disney+, new episodes available on Wednesdays
