MULTIVERSE.

NOT JUST a cool-sounding scientific term — like subspace, isotope or Bunsen burner — but a truly tantalising concept. It means that anything, literally anything, can happen. In one dimension of the multiverse, you’re currently holding not a film magazine but a medium-sized gibbon (watch out, they’re bitey). In another, the cover story for this issue is Crocodile Dundee 8. However bananas the idea, even if it features actual bananas, it can become a reality. Such is the power of the multiverse.

And it’s important to know this, because over the next 12 months or so we’re going to be plunged into glorious cinematic chaos, as some of our favourite movie characters get versed — multiversed, if you will — in the possibilities of this new reality.

In DC’S The Flash, Barry Allen will cross paths with Michael Keaton’s Batman. And in this Christmas’ Marvel extravaganza Spider-man: No Way Home, Peter Parker will have his hands full battling the ultimate rogues’ gallery, villains from an array of previous Spider-movies (fingers crossed for ‘Karate Thug’ from 1978’s Spider-man Strikes Back). It promises to be a goosebump-inducing spectacle — read Chris Hewitt’s cover story, where he speaks to everyone from Kevin Feige to Tom Holland himself, on page 50.

Elsewhere, we sit down with Halle Berry to discuss her Hollywood battles, reveal first looks at Nightmare Alley and Scream, and talk Diana with Kristen Stewart. Oh, and then there’s our plunge into the madness that was the making of Howard The Duck. In no version of the multiverse was that film ever a good idea.