Film franchises in the multiverse of gladness
Success of ‘Strange’ realities ‘Everywhere All at Once’ opens a portal for Hollywood.
Given the chaotic state of our own universe, with inflation, war in Europe and Washington shenanigans, perhaps it’s no surprise that what’s appealing most to audiences right now is the idea of countless alternative worlds.
The latest example is Walt Disney Co.’s “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” the new Marvel movie dominating the box office charts, as Marvel movies tend to do, with its $187million domestic opening weekend. Directed by Sam Raimi, Benedict Cumberbatch’s superhero sorcerer portals to a multitude of realities, adding more spinning force to the already dizzying plot of Marvel’s increasingly interdimensional franchise.
Hollywood always takes viewers to other worlds. But this goes beyond mere escapism in a way that feels specific to today.
Commercially speaking, the “Doctor Strange” sequel (if that’s the right term, given the cat’s cradle of temporality going on here) is Marvel’s follow-up to “SpiderMan: No Way Home,” which used the multiverse concept to bring back Spider-Men of the past, wrapping the audience in futuristic nostalgia and grossing nearly $1.9 billion worldwide in the process.
More key to the plot, though, the new film is equally a direct sequel to the Disney+ series “WandaVision,” in which Elizabeth Olsen’s protagonist Wanda Maximoff, a.k.a. the Scarlet Witch, created her own false sitcom bubble to cope with her trauma and loss, and now sets her sights on conquering the multiverse.
To which this reporter asks, are we OK?
Hollywood tends to say something about the times through even its most populist product, intentionally or not, whether in the paranoid conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s or the over-the-top macho action of the 1980s. Today’s audiences, inundated with apocalyptic messaging on cable news and social media, may be uniquely willing to imagine worlds within worlds that could have gone differently in incalculably varied ways.
They’re also accustomed to the feeling of having to parse what’s true in a world where we’re confronted with competing versions of reality every day. In Disney+’s latest Marvel show, “Moon Knight,” Oscar Isaac’s protagonist suffers from dissociative identity disorder. In Apple TV+’s dystopian sci-fi drama “Severance,” people choose to literally bifurcate their consciousness to avoid the uncomfortable aspects of their lives.
Even the indie darling of the moment is one that takes the multiverse concept to frenetic extremes. Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” from A24, posits that every decision Michelle Yeoh’s character makes (really, every choice every human has ever made), however slight, has created a separate branching reality.
The film has become an unlikely hit, grossing more than $40 million at the North American box office in two months.
The Daniels’ quirky version of a comic book movie dives into the deep end of space-time chaos, while offering a Kurt Vonnegut-style rebuttal to nihilism and an appeal to love and kindness as the only way to make sense of the madness. There’s something comforting about the notion that you might be able to access one of those universes, even one where people have hot dogs for fingers.
Characters have been traveling through time and space to correct historical and personal errors for decades. The core idea and plot of “Back to the Future” arguably is as weird as anything in Marvel’s multiverse, including “Loki,” which introduces a bureaucratic organization of time cops to the MCU and features an alligator version of the trickster god. Marty McFly, though, I must say, may have met his match in Yeoh’s underachieving laundromat owner.
The embrace of the multiverse also satisfies studio business imperatives, offering Hollywood a new cheat code of sorts. It allows the studios to expand their franchises in surprising directions without having to give them the full shake of the Etch-A-Sketch whenever a reboot is required.
Five years ago, if a studio wanted a new “Spider-Man” trilogy, the executives and filmmakers had to basically start from scratch. You had to toss out the old to bring in the new. Not anymore. With “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” Sony showed that the more Spider-People they put into the same movie, the better. Audiences accepted a world in which Peter Parker, Miles Morales, Gwen Stacy and SpiderHam could team up.
The industry has taken notice. Warner Bros.’ DC film unit seems to be aping Marvel again by doing its own version of crisscrossing realities. With its footage for “The Flash,” revealed at CinemaCon, the studio reintroduced Michael Keaton in the Batsuit, 30 years after he last played the Caped Crusader in Tim Burton’s “Batman Returns.” Think of it as the modern version of “Star Trek: Generations.”
Speaking of alternate realities, one of the richest people on Earth, Meta Platforms chief Mark Zuckerberg, wants to build a metaverse, a virtual world where people buy virtual clothes, attend virtual parties and work in virtual offices. Companies in entertainment, most notably Disney, are coming up with game plans for how they might participate in the virtual worlds.
If viewers want an escape from this planet, though, they don’t have to put on a VR headset. They can just watch Marvel.
This article is taken from the May 10 edition of the Wide Shot, a weekly newsletter about everything happening in the business of entertainment. Sign up at latimes.com/newsletters.