Flash in the pan: why multiplex multiverses are destined to fail
Back in 2013, the comedian Patton Oswalt appeared on an episode of Parks and Recreation, guest-starring as a concerned constituent who hijacks a city council meeting with a “citizen filibuster”. The remarks – entirely improvised by Oswalt, and released by NBC as an uncut, nearly nine-minute outtake of breathless elaboration – amounted to an unsolicited pitch for the then-justannounced project that would become Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Inspired by news of Disney acquiring Lucasfilm, the perfectly named Garth Blundin imagines an uber-blockbuster that would team the heroes of the galaxy far, far away with the marquee superheroes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The joke was on Oswalt’s unlikely fantasy scenario – his geeky desire to see the characters from one fictional universe interact with those of another, like action figures from different toy lines mixed and matched on a bedroom floor.
Flash forward 10 years. Today, the premise of Star Wars characters mingling with the Avengers hasn’t yet been realized, unless one counts a gag in the comedy Free Guy that put both Captain America’s shield and a lightsaber in the hands of Ryan Reynolds. All the same, the reality Oswalt/Blundin proposed has inched out of the realm of impossibility, and closer to inevitability.
We’re now living, after all, in an age in which three separate generations of Spider-Men share screen time; when Patrick Stewart wheels his way into a different Marvel continuity, teasing a full mutant takeover to come; and when, in this week’s The Flash, Michael Keaton throws on the cape and cowl again, ready to save a DC universe that bears little resemblance to the Gotham City he occupied three decades ago. It’s a brave new world of franchises colliding with each other … even if, as of right now, the crossovers mainly involve variations on the same characters, played by different actors.
The multiverse, that far-out notion that there are countless parallel versions of our reality, is how Disney, Warner Bros and Sony have narratively justified this new strategy – the way they’ve each turned the whole history of superhero cinema into one big sandbox. The Oscar-winning SpiderMan: Into the Spider-Verse introduced the idea to multiplex audiences, even as it only hinted at the crowd-pleasing possibilities of pulling old characters (and the stars that brought them to life) into the blockbuster present. Since then, Marvel has gone all in on the gimmick, building three present and forthcoming “phases” of its multi-year franchise plan around the existence of other dimensions. Cross-town rival DC appears to be following suit: if the ghoulish beyond-the-grave CGI cameos of The Flash’s third act are any indication, the company will soon be using the multiverse as license to reboot its whole line of costumed heroes.
It’s easy to see why this idea appeals to studio executives and audiences alike. It’s the natural evolution of the “shared universe”, the immensely popular practice of building franchises within franchises, so that the characters of separate movies can sometimes cross paths – superheroes assembling into supergroups, Godzilla fighting King Kong, Universal monsters capering together through a Dark Universe. (OK, so not all of these epic Hollywood meet-and-greets came to pass.) But the multiverse negates the need for years of set-up. Theoretically, studios can now cut straight to the dopamine hit of Avengers: Endgame without making a bunch of other movies first, because they’re drawing on a library of pre-existing movies and already beloved characters. Likewise, for viewers, multiverse stories combine the excitement of a big
team-up with the nostalgia rush of a legacy sequel. No wonder it’s a popular approach.
But is it sustainable? How long exactly can Hollywood strip-mine its own past in this particular way? So far, multiverse movies have succeeded through a potent combination of surprise and novelty. Audiences didn’t expect to see Tobey Maguire or Andrew Garfield back in the red tights, and they certainly never expected to see them together; Spider-Man: No Way Home broke the innate rules of reboot culture, suddenly suggesting that multiple versions of a popular character could coexist. It was a neat trick, but is it repeatable? Maguire and Garfield showing up, in brief clip form, in the recent SpiderMan: Across the Spider-Verse has inspired some applause … but nothing like what greeted their appearances in No Way Home. Been there, clapped at that already.
Make no mistake, applause is what these multiversal blockbusters are chasing, predominantly. They even have a tendency to pause for it. Most of them, so far, have looked at the literally endless possibilities of the multiverse – the notion of an infinite number of other realities – and mainly seen the opportunity to flash a familiar face in front of moviegoers like a pair of jangling keys. Last year’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness successfully secured Stewart’s Professor Xavier, a godfather of the modern superhero movie, only to reduce his involvement to the final float of a cameo parade. Likewise, while it’s fun to see Keaton back in the biggest role of his career, The Flash doesn’t do terribly much with his Batman, content to supply him with a couple of old catchphrases. And once you’ve brought these famous figures back, there’s inevitably going to be less excitement about seeing them again; it’s the event-movie equivalent of those big rock-star reunion tours, which tend to sell a little less in their second and third legs than they do during the first few dates.
There are plenty of other characters, of course. We’ll probably see a good number of them in Marvel’s forthcoming Secret Wars, four years from now, which is already heavily rumored to be the studio’s eventual attempt at a multiversal Endgame – a stab at achieving the apotheosis of this trend of yanking yesterday’s favorite heroes out of the vault and back into action. But it’s not an undrainable pool of people audiences will be excited to see again. Will they cheer for Ben Affleck’s Daredevil? How about, back across town, Shaquille O’Neal’s Steel? The risk of this fundamentally referential approach to franchising is twofold. The shock and the thrill will wear off eventually. At the same time, collapsing the boundaries between separate series threatens to diminish the appeal of individual ones; are audiences coming to prefer the quick, exhaustible sting of recognition – of having their memory jogged – above all else?
No Way Home, at the very least, does a little more than just stare through a portal into the past. It plays on the actual dramatic stakes of old movies – on our past relationships to these ghosts of aborted franchises. The film’s smartest choice is to give Garfield’s Peter Parker an actual arc, resolving the emotional cliffhanger of his second Amazing Spider-Man. For the multiverse to sustain itself, studios might stand to take the right lesson from that movie’s success, and learn from the opportunity for closure it capitalized on. There’s only fleeting, superficial success to be found in treating intellectual property like props, or in assuming that a character’s presence alone is enough.
Then again, Hollywood could (and probably will) just push this strategy past Endgame to a logical endpoint. How long before Oswalt’s prophecy comes true, and the walls separating one fantasy world from another completely collapse? Is a title fight between Darth Vader and Thanos far off? These days, no time is too long ago and no galaxy so far away that a bridge to both can’t be built.