The MCU – Marvel Cinematic Universe – was riding high after successfully capping off the Infinity saga, and once the cosmic dust of Thanos’s legions had settled, that meant they couldn’t just coast and reheat the same narrative arc. Going forward, there were pivots and hurdles to be had on multiple fronts.
There’s a lot of discussion to be had about why phase 4 by-and-large landed with less impact than phase 3 and phase 5 is going similarly: the climax of the Infinity saga brought everyone together and redeemed years of well-earned, carefully-sown character arcs and continuity, while phase 4 saw everyone branching back off again into their own corners of the universe, taking with them that sense of thematic cohesion; you could talk about how the increased reliance on Disney+ shows as a core part of the narrative, done chiefly to promote the streaming service, runs the risk of creating continuity lockout among more fairweather viewers who don’t have the time, interest or energy to absorb every second of content in this one massive series, at a time when I feel Feige and co. should perhaps have been building jumping-on points instead.
The movies and shows, by and large, are mostly good – just not up to the level of the climactic films before. In fact, it feels weird to be writing this in what is now phase 5, because phase 4 was the first phase of the series to just sort of…end. No real climax, no real main arc beyond some thematic throughlines. It’s the only phase so far in which the Avengers do not, in fact, assemble. If phase 3 is a carefully constructed Jenga tower, phase 4 sees all those pieces scattered across the floor, and it doesn’t do the heavy lifting of picking them back up just yet.
In eschewing a climax, the series also robbed itself of the kind of tight arc-plotting that is demanded by having a bill coming due for cashing in the chips. And it’d have been savvy from a marketing standpoint, too, because I really think that being able to properly visualize a point of high action and high stakes and arc convergence that all the current stories are leading to really helps to keep audiences hooked in a long-game series like this.
And that’s all to say nothing about how while using Endgame to conclude both Tony and Steve’s arcs was the right choice in my mind, thematically, it also pulled away some of the very strong leads whom the series was by-and-large anchored around. And truthfully, there are a whole host of strong candidates to take up that mantle, but without any centralizing climax events post-Endgame thus far, we haven’t yet an opportunity to see the big moments and throughlines coming together that would elevate the remaining cast of heroes to be The Next Stark, though they’ve been deliberately slow-burning that exact thing with Peter’s arc in particular.
I criticize in broad strokes, but don’t get me wrong; I’m celebrating the fact that this kind of intricate long-game plotting and these massive climax events that redeem years of carefully-seeded continuity are things that are now accepted as a part of mainstream big-budget storytelling, and that we’re getting it at the pace we are would have seemed unthinkable fifteen years ago. Of course there are some duds along the way, but the baseline is overall really good, and the fact that at its best, it’s giving us films like Civil War, Ragnarok and Infinity War isn’t something to take for granted. We are actually spoiled rotten as both fans and consumers of media.
This could have gone so wrong in so many ways, as the Distinguished Competition found out the rough way. I’m not taking this for granted and you shouldn’t either. Elsewhere in the mediaverse, Silent Hills got cancelled and I will never stop dying angry about that, the DCEU went all pear-shaped before it was ripe, the Star Wars NT got Leeroy Jenkins’d onto the screen without any sort of coherent arc plan, but for whatever structural criticisms I have of phases 4 and 5 of the MCU, we actually get to live in a Good Timeline for this! This is what that feels like and it’s really pretty good!
And on that note, one film in particular seemed to fly high above all those broad-strokes phase 4 criticisms. Spider-Man: No Way Home is, to me (and many others if the discourse is any indication), nothing short of a miracle movie, and as of this writing, it rounds out my top 3 MCU films along with the Infinity duology.
Structurally it’s actually a bit of an outlier in the MCU: while individual characters have their solo movies, 1, 2, 3 etc, rarely do you have it that those movies are actually meant to be watched back-to-back in terms of that character’s arc: Thor has an Avengers crisis event in between each of his self-titled films, for instance, and oh sweet summer child if you think you can just trundle from Doctor Strange 1 into Multiverse Of Madness without first watching the stuff that came between those films.
But No Way Home is the rare “solo” MCU film that picks up immediately where its predecessor left off, with Mysterio’s final trick unmasking Peter to the world and framing him for murder in one fell swoop. From there, Peter and Strange’s attempt to remedy the situation ends up breaking the fabric of spacetime. You know, I still say this is basically one big domino chain that started with Nick Fury poncing off to space and sending skrulls to pretend to be him on Earth, thus being unable to vouch for Peter, and then and then and then a pumpkin bomb in Strange’s magic box cracks the multiversal firmament. Goddammit Nick.
I found that something very exciting happened after No Way Home landed: people were suddenly talking about the previous Spider-Man film series again, and I found myself revisiting them as well.
To my eyes, most hard reboots taste cold and grim (except when absolutely necessary – come on, what was Chris Nolan really supposed to do following up on Batman & Robin except a hard reboot?), because by their nature they are built on the denial of continuity.
With multiverse narratives, and especially what we see in No Way Home, all that seemingly abandoned continuity is not only bought back, but redeemed. It all matters again, and even those past films are made richer for it, because they’re no longer isolated strands of an earlier era of license-based filmmaking; they’re retroactively a part of this same saga, their character arcs and plot threads re-woven into the great web of life and destiny.
I’ve already summed up my feelings on multiverse stories the best I can, so let’s hear it again: to me, the multiverse is a metaphor for the fact that everything matters. That all the continuity and the stories and the amazing worlds you’ve consumed are not cold, detached things. That everything matters, that themes cross between universes, that the tales we tell are part of something bigger.
There’s this thing that can happen in long-running series like Doctor Who, Star Trek, the MCU et cetera, where seemingly little things early on can end up foreshadowing bigger things later on, in ways that the makers honestly didn’t intend at the time. I think back to that scene in the first Raimiverse Spider-Man, when the Goblin makes his pitch to Peter, claiming that “sooner or later, they will hate you”. That the one thing the people love more than a hero is to watch a hero fall. That scene really feels like it’s foreshadowing something important, doesn’t it? Except in the Raimi trilogy, it…doesn’t come to anything? Other than Jameson’s usual bugbearing, the people don’t turn against Spider-Man in the Raimiverse. The scene is nice but it doesn’t even really seem to fit at long sight. Enter No Way Home, and what the Goblin prophesizes comes to pass – not for his Peter, but for the MCU Peter, during a cascade of events that ultimately brings this Goblin into his universe.
I mentioned making the continuity of past films richer, and I can think of no better example than Amazing Spider-Man 2. They had the balls to play out the Gwen Stacy death but fumbled it in the homestretch: because they were so over-eager to end on the note of “Yay, Spider-Man doing the crime fighting!”, they played it up that Webbverse Peter got over his grief in like a month and went back at it. This – grief doesn’t work like this. In the comics, Gwen’s death created such a hole in Peter’s heart that he’ll probably never truly recover fully from it. Webbverse Peter getting over it in a month is kind of insulting on multiple levels.
Well, No Way Home reveals that he didn’t; he was just trying to pass, to be the hero the people wanted, and ultimately the cracks showed; he became ‘rageful’, as he puts it.
(If you’ll allow me to get distracted real quick, this touches on another phenom you see from time to time: one writer or showrunner retroactively fixing things by reinserting them in a more appropriate context. Also see: the Flux event in Doctor Who is a huge action-packed arc in which half the universe is destroyed, but then-showrunner Chibnall didn’t bother to give us the full scope of the destruction, nor to show the consequences this would have for the Doctor’s psyche. Then Davies fixed that for us in Wild Blue Yonder, where we get the definite scope of the destruction, as well as made clear that the Flux does in fact compose the Doctor’s next big Trauma Thing that haunts them, and it should. It makes the Flux, already a solid showing by Chibnall’s admittedly precarious standards, even better in hindsight.)
With the Raimiverse Peter, it’s just good to get a coda to his story that isn’t Spider-Man 3. His zen, measured way speaks volumes about where he is now as a person. But with the Webbverse Peter, his story was left unfinished, unfulfilled, hacked up; No Way Home does what it can to fix and salvage. That moment when he gets to save the MCU’s MJ from her own ‘Goblinfall’ – even curling under her before shooting his web upward, specifically to keep from making the same mistake that took Gwen from him (thank CinemaWins for spotting that, not me), is breathtaking. Arc completed.
And the Goblin. Oh, the Goblin. There’s one huge reason why Willem Dafoe’s Goblin succeeds in No Way Home in a way that he wasn’t allowed to in his first outing in 2002.
There’s a part in the comics during the Kindred saga, when Kindred favours us with a very nice monologue on just what Norman Obsorn represents – to him and Peter, yes, but in a meta sense to the Spider-Man mythos as a whole. He boils it down to the fact that Norman represents ‘the death of innocence made flesh’. The Green Goblin, in the Spider-verse, is the part where it all changes. In the mainline comics, he took Gwen, changing not just the tone of the Spider-comics but an era of cape comics as a whole; in the Ultimate timeline, Miles became the one Spider-Man because Osborn cut to the quick and killed Peter Parker. Norman Osborn earns the clout as one of fiction’s great villains because he is, demonstrably, the dark and the anguish and the heartbreak made manifest.
In the 2002 movie, we call back to the iconic bridge sequence from the comics, we get hints at what might happen, but it doesn’t. Norman in the Raimiverse leaves his scars on the surface, but in my reading of these stories, the really special thing about the Goblin is that the scars he leaves run right down to the soul, embedding themselves in the very core of the narrative. But the Raimi movie was made at a time when superhero films thought in the moment, not always making the most of their assets. (See also the Joker dying in the first Burtman film.) Of course this tentpole blockbuster that was set on being beloved by kids and adults alike wasn’t going to end with Mary Jane dying.
With No Way Home, this Goblin finally gets a chance to be, per Kindred, the death of innocence made flesh. The death of this young, vibrant, driven Aunt May at the Goblin’s hand casts him in stone as MCU Peter’s greatest enemy, easily the most pivotal moment of Peter’s thus-far six-film arc in the MCU. Moreso even than Stark’s death, because the Goblin’s machinations are the fallout of Peter’s best laid plans. To me, it actually makes the first Raimiverse film better in hindsight, now that we know this is where it was all leading, that this ruthless monster we recognize from the comics was lurking all along underneath the veneer of a colourful, friendly blockbuster from many of our childhoods. He just got stopped by his own universe’s Peter before he could succeed.
And all that’s to say nothing of Willem Dafoe finally getting to show the world the biggest mistake his original film’s costume designers made, and to correct that error: the Goblin’s look in the first Raimiverse film was divisive, for sure. In their defense, the Goblin suit from the comics and cartoons is one of those things that works in animation or illustration but poses an issue in live action, being like this living-skin sort of suit where the mask has this Goosebumps-Haunted-Mask quality to it where it sort of becomes his face when he puts it on?
I always thought the 2002 bodysuit was fine, but the headpiece overcompensated and ended up obscuring the best part: Willem Dafoe is the Goblin. He doesn’t need prosthetics or effects. He is the special effect. Norman smashes the mask Kylo Ren style early in No Way Home in a fit of rage after some taunting from his ‘darker half’, and once the Goblin takes over in full, Dafoe’s face contorts and stretches in monstrous ways, all while he preens and gloats and flattens his voice into this almost supernaturally eerie register, before letting loose with a pitch-perfect Goblin cackle that could be ripped right out of the comic pages. I got similar chills watching him re-become the Green Goblin as I did watching Heath Ledger become the Joker.
He keeps the green bodysuit, but the shredded purple fabric that comes to line it both colour-codes him closer to his comics version, and the disorganized, off-kilter look of the fabric adds to the feeling of sheer madness that emanates from the Goblin.
Ultimately, all this is so satisfying to me because the Goblin really does get to be ‘the death of innocence made flesh’ for MCU Peter. And it feels all the more meaningful because it’s literally the same Goblin we watched in theaters two decades prior, who didn’t quite get to live up to the full potential of what his character means for the series then.
But on the whole, No Way Home presents us a take on multiversal stories that is warm and inviting, where there are new threats, but also other selves who provide solidarity and warmth. The final act marshals and wields nostalgia for the right reasons and to the right ends, doing so while looking forward instead of only backward.
Contrast with one of the narratives that did the multiverse Before It Was Cool, Bioshock Infinite, where the multiverse is presented in a darker, harsher way, each new revelation taking us deeper into a realm of quantum secrets humanity was better off not knowing. And while I’m talking about it, I’d like to swing back to how lowkey unsettling it is that in Infinite, Booker and Elizabeth never actually return to their ‘home’ timeline. But that’s all a digression on my part because I can’t sit still.
Meanwhile, the next film in the MCU timeline, Doctor Strange And The Multiverse Of Madness, takes a different approach to the concept: rather than pulling in and buying back continuity from pre-existing stories, we see Strange hopping through some alternate worlds custom made for the film. Madness has a bit of an inverse relationship with character dynamics as No Way Home, then, with Strange and us as viewers being pulled into unfamiliar worlds rather than the other way round.
I’ve been trying to put into words the broader reasons why Multiverse Of Madness didn’t seem to resonate with audiences as deeply as No Way Home does, beyond the obvious that No Way Home is on its face just such a hard act to follow, and I think I might be on to something.
I’ve heard some discussion about how the Illuminati in the main alternate world we visit in Madness don’t feel like they matter at all and are just there to appear as fanservice cameos and then get killed. While I would say this is a bit too uncharitable (as I would argue that as with any character in the series who only shows up for one film, they began mattering as soon as they were inserted into the chain of events), there is a grain of truth to it that helps us differentiate powerful, awesome multiverse narratives from the ones that misuse the tools at their disposal.
The comics version of Spider-Verse is, lamentably, a perfect example of what happens when a writer uses the multiverse to flatten and diminish would-be powerful story beats instead of using it to supercharge and enhance the story, as No Way Home and DC’s Metal/Death Metal do.
In the comics version of Spider-Verse, writer Dan Slott makes the mistake of failing to compel us to care about the alternates (which is similar to those criticisms of the Illuminati in Madness).
Sounds harsh, but here’s what Slott does leading up to the event: page after page, issue after issue of various Spider-Men getting killed by the Inheritors. We meet them and then they are immediately dead. We just aren’t given the tools that a better story would wield to compel us to care; these particular alternates don’t contribute to anything, they don’t really service the plot or provide some powerful thematic insight, they’re just there and then they’re gone. Unlike other versions of said ‘verse, the comics Spider-Verse event commits the cardinal sin of frivolousness.
I don’t think we can fairly call Madness’s use of the concept frivolous; it clearly makes an effort to tie what happens in the two other realities Strange spends real time in back to his character dynamic and his arc.
But then why did Multiverse Of Madness land with so much of a messier splat than No Way Home’s deft touchdown? I want to say it’s that it’s far less character-focused, but it actually does have plenty, dealing with Strange having to grapple with who he is and who he might become under the right, or wrong circumstances. Is…is it acceptable to say that a lot of the characterization on display in Madness just doesn’t hit like what we get in No Way Home? Can it really just be that simple, that easy? But then I can’t go on a stream of consciousness voyage with you for seventeen paragraphs, and what kind of world would that be?
For any of Madness’s failings, we have to give it credit that the back half of the film picks a lane, revs up and hits the gas hard. Right from, “Who said anything about living?”, things get cranked.
As an aside, Strange possessing the rotting corpse of his alternate-reality self is easily one of the most viscerally disturbing things in the MCU thus far, and it’s down to how…can I use the word realistic here? It’s the way Strange is continually fighting against the stiff corpse’s rigor mortis, how his hoarse, ragged voice sounds like he’s forcing a dead windpipe to form words – I hate it, but I love it.
While Multiverse Of Madness is unquestionably the most metal MCU film ever, there actually were a few super-specific things I was hoping to get from it that it didn’t end up having – the buzz that they considered and then scrapped a cameo from Daniel Craig’s James Bond set my mind off on this tangent that the film would have this whole insane sequence where Strange would be hopping from reality to reality and it would just be the craziest and most blatant and wonderful fanservice you’ve ever seen.
Don’t get me wrong, that one bit where he and America are falling through a bunch of rapid-fire realities is cool, and there are definitely some nuggets there for deep-cut Marvel fans (The Living Tribunal, the Savage Land, 2099), but those are all properties that we all eventually expected to show up in the MCU in some capacity.
No, I’m talking about like – some insane chase sequence where Strange leaps through a portal, comes out the other side on Coruscant or something, goes through another portal into an animated world with an animated Strange and we see characters from whatever animated Disney classic is your favourite, he jumps through another portal and lands in the X-Men universe with a Jackman Wolverine cameo (this was written before Deadpool & Wolverine was a thing, which gives you some insight into how long I have some of these things cooking), jumps through another portal into Tron, jumps through another portal into one of those universes where characters spontaneously break into song, and he rolls his eyes and just goes with it and belts out a super-catchy verse, then another portal and we suddenly get a Simpsons couch gag where a Simpsonified Strange runs through their living room, then another portal and he’s back to live-action in the Evil Dead universe and crashes into Bruce Campbell’s Ash fighting Deadites, now he’s got a bunch of Deadites on his ass too, he opens a portal back to Coruscant and brings out a lightsaber, oh shit it’s Doctor Strange wielding a lightsaber back-to-back with Ash and the chainsaw, the saber like starts getting all these golden glyphs on its surface because he’s using magic to wield it effectively and oh shit the internet just exploded.
You know – taking advantage of Disney’s antitrust-nightmare warchest of accumulated franchises to provide a sequence of absolutely insane, ridiculous and awesome crossover setups that you couldn’t get anywhere else (in canon). I understand that’s not the movie they were trying to make and definitely would have clashed with the very horror-esque direction that Raimi wields in the finished film, but come on, stuff. And as funny as Pizza Poppa was, don’t tell me that the lack of an actual Ash cameo in Multiverse Of Madness wasn’t in itself a bit of a disappointment.
(In my mind, that lava world we see a couple times just absolutely has to be Mustafar. Please let me have this.)
But wait, isn’t that the kind of cheap frivolousness I knocked the comics Spider-Verse for? Well, no, I don’t think so, because that brings us to another element of all this I haven’t touched on yet: not only do truly great multiverse stories wield the concept to give us powerful stories that in many cases invoke huge continuity redemptions, but another big element of it is that so many of them are so fucking fun. (Maybe that’s one reason why Multiverse Of Madness became such a divisive film? It’s definitely high on the doom and gloom and uses much of its potentially fantastical landscape as a backdrop for Wanda’s mounting insanity. But at the same time, the film going full Evil Dead in the last act with the demons and the corpse possession tended to be received pretty well in isolation from the other elements. Maybe ‘the film just doesn’t hit like No Way Home overall’ really is the answer here.)
But there’s this sheer joy that these kinds of stories can bring out, a kind of meta-celebration of what these stories are made of. I want to have fun with this. You want to have fun with this. Just look at the very existence of Spider-Gwen, or if we look at a different series altogether, at the alternate reality Tawna from Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time. New versions of old characters who never really got to be anything (respectively, a character whose death – per Strange’s speech in No Way Home – was more important to the grand calculus of the multiverse than her life, and a character whose only mainline series appearance was as a damsel in distress).
Now these new versions get to be something, and they’re better than the originals, and the fanbases eagerly welcomed both characters with open arms. We could tell the creators were having a blast making these redesigns and it bleeds through.
I actually did get my wish for a ridiculous cameo-spam setpiece-chewing scene like that elsewhere, and it came in an unexpected form: Space Jam: A New Legacy.
If the original was insane in concept and execution, A New Legacy makes the original look like My Dinner With Andre. It’s not strictly-speaking a ‘true’ multiverse story, as the action takes place within the Warner Bros. servers thus giving an in-universe excuse for all this, but it sure feels like it. In particular, I need to shout out that whole sequence where Lebron and Bugs are hopping from franchise to franchise getting the old team back together – we get the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote in the midst of Mad Max: Fury Road, Lola Bunny completing Wonder Woman’s trials to become an Amazon, Daffy Duck running afoul of the Justice League, et cetera – all with respective animation styles and live action segments intermeshed seamlessly. It’s such a joy, and there’s that word again. (I’m aware the movie’s critical reception was pretty dire, but this is one of those cases where I genuinely can’t really understand why.)
But back to the question I posed and didn’t answer, I think the big reason No Way Home resonated with the same audiences who weren’t quite as high on Multiverse Of Madness is because No Way Home wields the multiverse in a redemptive way, cashing in chips we didn’t even know were on the table. Multiverse Of Madness….doesn’t, by and large.
But speaking of redeeming chips we’ve accumulated over the years, No Way Home is an intensely character-driven film, drilling down on character arcs that had been built up for almost two decades to that point. It doesn’t forget to have fun and be that sort of meta-celebration I talked about, but it doesn’t just pat itself on the back. It recognizes that there’s more to be gained than lost from taking the story in this direction.
But what if there was a movie in this continuum that completely went for broke and cashed it all in? How awesome would that be?
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Marvel Cinematic Multiverse, they really did it. They swung for the fences as hard as they possibly could. Across The Spider-Verse is the film that ties everything together.
When Miguel O’Hara grouses in an early scene about MCU Peter and Strange nearly breaking the multiversal firmament (again, that was technically the Goblin…), it’s such a squee moment on its face, but it’s only the very tip of the tip of the iceberg here. Across The Spider-Verse brings it all in: everything from the comics to all the movies to all the games, from Atari to Insomniac, even the video game adaptations of the movies. It’s all canon and all connected in the same multiverse.
Can I just gush about how remarkable it is that this movie came from Sony of all companies? They went from fighting tooth and nail to deny this multiverse the connection and continuity it so richly deserved and needed back in the testy years when they were hoarding Spidey for themselves, to absolutely going for it and bringing the party with them.
The entire movie bleeds with the love and care and joy of its makers. And taking it back to my comparison to the comics Spider-Verse, we can see in the Miles movies how to compel us to care about the alternates. We see Gwen’s world, which is given a truly distinct aesthetic and how her story is framed from her POV. (In fact, the film opens from her perspective.) We’re given well enough to really care about the down-on-his-luck Peter we met back in Into The Spider-Verse.
But Across is just a fantastic movie in general, the aesthetics are mixed, meshed and chopped and screwed as players from different universes interact, Daniel Pemberton’s soundtrack bangs unbelievably (imagine if Two Steps From Hell and Celldweller were locked in a studio together and told not to come out until they had something, then a punk rock band stopped in for a kegger, then came the world instruments representing different universes playing up different cultures and then and then and then) and of course, there’s such a big beating heart at the center of it all that ties it all together.
I’ve been ragging on the comics version of Spider-Verse a lot here, so it behooves me to mention that Dan Slott worked on Across The Spider-Verse as an ideas man, so in a way, we can consider it his redemptive second pass at the concept.
So maybe what it takes to make a great multiverse story isn’t a hard-and-fast list of what it does or doesn’t do, or how big or small it is, but how it makes you feel with what it has on hand – just like any story. Long live the joyous, celebratory, continuity-enriching and redemptive multiverse story, and for whatever speedbumps the series has encountered in the aftermath of the Infinity saga, the post-Thanos Marvel multiverse has been laying down some fantastic examples of how to do it with flying colours.
And as of this thing going up, we now have the latest example of long-benched continuity being redeemed in the MCU – in this case the entire X-Men universe, with Deadpool And Wolverine bridging the gap, officially buying back and buying in every inch of the XCU and then some. The slate of new-release MCU movies had definitely slowed down since the glory-days of phase 3, but from early reports of audience reactions, Deadpool & Wolverine is here to show that we are so back. Excelsior.