There's a beloved meme that's been kicking around for the past 12 years featuring a frame from the 1967 Spider-Man animated series in which two identical friendly neighborhood web crawlers point at one another accusingly. It's become so prevalent that it was faithfully recreated in a post-credits scene from Into the Spider-Verse. It also presaged the current glut of multiversal cinema — movies of all stripes and colors wherein it's mandatory to expect multiple versions of characters sharing the screen.
Earlier this year at the Academy Awards, The Daniels' gonzo, sincere and idiosyncratic genre-blending melodrama Everything Everywhere All at Once made Oscars representational history, overwhelming the ceremony like a tidal wave with seven wins, including Best Picture. In addition to being a landmark for diversity during awards season, it was also a feather in the cap for the newly ubiquitous genre of multiversal science fiction, which has exploded onto theater screens over the last few years. As the summer movie cycle revs up, this trend seems to be as prevalent as ever, with new superhero entrants in Marvel's Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and DC's The Flash.
Pinpointing the origins of this movement is almost as tricky as keeping track of which universe's Spider-Man or Flash we're following at any given time and how or why they're interacting. Geeks (like me) know that the idea of a multiverse first made pop culture landfall in the early '60s in the pages of DC Comics' "Flash of Two Worlds," where the Flash of DC's "Silver Age," Barry Allen, accidentally finds himself on Earth-2, where he encounters the 1940's-era Flash Jay Garrick, resolving a contradiction in continuity. It paved the way for major comic book events like Crisis on Infinite Earths and Flashpoint (this summer's The Flash appears to be borrowing heavily from the latter).
There are forebears in films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? or the more recent LEGO films and Ready Player One, which gleefully collide intellectual properties like a kid playing with mismatched action figures. 2008's acclaimed animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse — another multiversal Oscar winner — arguably kicked open the door with a vibrant, energetic and nonetheless comprehensible narrative centered on the Afro-Latino teen Miles Morales and no less than four other Spider-people (and one Spider-pig) from other worlds.
Capitalizing on that film's breakthrough success, Marvel Studios got multiverse fever, as evidenced by subsequent entries like the Disney+ TV series Loki and Wanda Vision, as well as last year's Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and 2021's Spider-Man: No Way Home used some magic mambo-jumbo to unite Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man from the Sam Raimi trilogy, Andrew Garfield's Peter Parker from his two reboot films, and the MCU's current webslinger Tom Holland. What little we can glean from their upcoming slate indicates things are only going to get more complex and head-spinning in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including a second season of Loki that's expected to arrive later this year.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, which hits theaters on June 2, looks to double-down on the quantity of alternate arachnid heroes and antiheroes, adding Oscar Isaac, Issa Rae, Daniel Kaluuya and more to its already colorful cast. Hot on the heels of Across the Spider-Verse, the aforementioned DC tentpole The Flash races into theaters on June 16. Based on the trailers and television spots, audiences should know to expect to see two Barry Allens (both portrayed by problematic tabloid fixture Ezra Miller), Ben Affleck's final turn as Batman, and the return of Michael Keaton to the dark knight's cape and cowl, 31 years after he last played the part in Batman Returns. There's also going to be an alternate universe Supergirl, a revivified alien despot from Man of Steel, and, apparently, also Wonder Woman. When it comes to both of these potential blockbusters, call it the kitchen sink approach to superhero cinema.
Evidently, all of these Spider-Men-and-Women-and-Animals and Flashes are here to stay. And as Everything Everywhere All at Once's financial and critical success proved, multiverse movies are a sensation with mainstream moviegoers as much as arthouse audiences. Perhaps we've collectively grown tired of the same characters toplining their franchises over the last 50 years, varied though their interpretations may have been. Or maybe we've all been so inundated with superhero media and hifalutin sci-fi that we're primed for such ambitious storytelling within the genre. As The AV Club's Matt Schimkowitz put it in his recent reaction to an unfinished screening of The Flash at Cinemacon 2023, "It's staggering how many bizarre and obtuse plot mechanics Marvel has pushed into the public discourse in the past decade."
No matter the reasons, filmgoers: It's Hollywood's multiverse, and we're just living in it. ♦
