An essay on the structural decision that defined the MCU’s Phase Four collapse and the continuing crisis through Phase Five. Linked from every Phase One through Phase Four review and from the MCU overview.
The Premise And Its Cost
The multiverse is the concept that the universe of any given story is one of an infinite number of parallel universes, each containing variations on the characters, events, and physical laws of the original. In comic book storytelling, the multiverse has existed since the 1960s as a device for crossing characters between distinct continuities, exploring alternate versions of established characters, and providing publishers with mechanisms for resetting their canons when accumulated continuity became unmanageable.
The multiverse concept is native to the comic book medium and has functioned reasonably well within that medium for over half a century.
I’m angry about this the way you only get angry at something you loved. The Infinity Saga was the best thing big-studio filmmaking pulled off in my lifetime, eleven years of stories that paid each other off, and Marvel traded it for a gimmick that lets them bring anybody back for a curtain call. Marvel made that call on purpose, and I think it’s the worst one anybody in that building has made.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe imported the multiverse concept into its serialized film franchise starting in 2021 with the Loki Disney+ series and Spider-Man: No Way Home. The import has been the single most damaging creative decision in the franchise’s history. The multiverse concept that works in comic book storytelling doesn’t work in the same way in serialized cinema, and the MCU’s adoption of it has systematically dismantled the structural foundations that made the Infinity Saga function.
The core problem is consequence removal. The multiverse premise eliminates the dramatic weight that depends on permanence. Death stops mattering because death is reversible through alternate-universe variants. Character history stops mattering because alternate versions can have different histories. Plot decisions stop mattering because alternate decisions exist in alternate universes. Drama requires stakes. Stakes require consequences. Consequences require permanence. The multiverse removes permanence and therefore removes the foundation that all serialized drama depends on.
What The MCU Had Before The Multiverse
The Infinity Saga from 2008 through 2019 worked on the principle that what happened in one film mattered in later films. Tony Stark’s character development across Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Iron Man 3, The Avengers, Age of Ultron, Civil War, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Infinity War, and Endgame represented real accumulating consequence. The Tony Stark of Endgame was a different character than the Tony Stark of Iron Man because eleven years of events had changed him.
His sacrifice at the end of Endgame mattered because the audience had watched him become someone for whom that sacrifice would be characteristic. The serialized investment paid off in the climactic moment because the foundation had been built across multiple films.
I think Tony’s death is the best-earned ending the franchise ever produced. Everything I care about in the Infinity Saga is packed into that moment, and every multiverse cameo since has chipped a little more off it.
Steve Rogers’ arc across Captain America: The First Avenger, The Avengers, The Winter Soldier, Civil War, Infinity War, and Endgame followed the same principle. Rogers was a character whose history shaped his decisions. His final retirement to live a quiet life with Peggy Carter worked as resolution because the audience had watched him work toward that resolution across seven films and a decade of plot development.
The supporting characters worked under the same accumulating-consequence principle. Pepper Potts. James Rhodes. Bucky Barnes. Sam Wilson. Natasha Romanoff. Wanda Maximoff. The Vision. Each character had a trajectory that the franchise honored across films. When characters died, the deaths mattered because the characters had been built up sufficiently for their loss to register. When characters changed, the changes mattered because the audience had watched the changes happen in real serialized time.
The Infinity Stones provided the structural spine that organized the accumulating consequences.
The Stones were finite. There were six of them. They’d specific properties and specific locations. The franchise’s central narrative was the gradual revelation of the Stones and the eventual collection of all six by the antagonist Thanos. The structure had edges. The audience could see where the narrative was going. The structural setup justified the narrative payoff.
What The Multiverse Destroys
Every structural element described above disappears under the multiverse premise.
Permanent deaths are no longer permanent because alternate-universe variants of the deceased exist and the franchise can introduce them. Character history is no longer fixed because alternate histories are available for any character. Plot decisions are no longer consequential because alternate decisions exist in alternate timelines that the narrative can access through multiverse mechanisms. Infinite possibility replaces the finite structure of the Infinity Stones. That functionally means no structure at all.
Specific examples of the consequence destruction in Phase Four and Phase Five projects:
Spider-Man: No Way Home in 2021 introduced Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker and Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker as alternate-universe variants who appear in the Tom Holland Spider-Man’s film.
The decision satisfied fan service appetites and grossed nearly two billion dollars worldwide. It also established that the MCU was now operating under multiverse rules where characters from defunct previous franchises could appear at will. The death of any MCU character no longer has permanent weight because an alternate-universe variant could be introduced in any later film.
The Tony Stark sacrifice at the end of Endgame loses some of its dramatic finality because a Tony Stark variant could appear in any future MCU project.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in 2022 introduced the Illuminati, a team of alternate-universe variants of major Marvel characters including Patrick Stewart’s Professor X from the Fox X-Men franchise, John Krasinski’s Reed Richards as a Fantastic Four version, and several others. The Illuminati exist for approximately ten minutes of screen time and the film kills them during a single sequence. The deaths register as weightless because the film introduced the characters to provide brief fan-service appearances before eliminating them.
The audience can’t mourn characters they were introduced to in the same film they died in, especially when the characters were variants of established characters whose primary versions remain alive in their own continuities.
Loki on Disney+ across two seasons developed an elaborate cosmology around the Time Variance Authority and the management of branch timelines. The cosmology works as setup for multiverse rules without delivering gripping drama. The series destroys multiple timelines with what the show treats as significant consequences. The audience doesn’t experience these as consequences because the show hasn’t introduced the audience to the populations of those timelines as characters. Watching a branch timeline disappear is structurally equivalent to watching a number on a counter decrease.
The destruction has no dramatic weight because there’s nothing dramatic to weigh.
Deadpool & Wolverine in 2024 grossed approximately one and a third billion dollars on the strength of Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool returning Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine to the screen as a multiverse variant. The film is nostalgia entertainment delivered through multiverse mechanisms. The Wolverine character had received a definitive emotional ending in Logan in 2017. The Logan ending was among the most affecting moments in superhero cinema. Deadpool & Wolverine undermines the Logan ending by returning the character as a multiverse variant who can exist alongside the deceased Logan timeline without contradiction.
The financial success of the choice doesn’t change the dramatic damage. I’d have put a fence around the Logan ending, and Marvel dug it up for a box office bump. The audience can’t fully feel that ending anymore because the character can return whenever it’s commercially convenient, and I find that more cynical than anything else the multiverse has done.
The Comic Book Origin Problem
For fifty years before its import to the MCU, the multiverse premise was native to comic book storytelling. Comic book readers who grew up with the concept understand the conventions and accept the trade-offs.
Death is reversible. Characters return from elaborate alternate-reality scenarios. Continuity resets occur every decade or so to manage accumulated complexity. The conventions are familiar to long-time readers and are part of what they signed up for.
The mainstream film audience that came to the MCU during the Infinity Saga didn’t come for these conventions.
The mainstream audience came for serialized cinema with accumulating consequence. The MCU was popular partly because it functioned more like prestige television than like comic books, with characters whose arcs mattered across films and whose decisions had lasting impact. The audience that built the MCU into the largest film franchise in history did so on the assumption that the franchise worked by serialized drama rules instead of by comic book reset rules.
The pivot to multiverse storytelling in Phase Four imposed comic book conventions onto an audience that didn’t accept those conventions. The dropping audience scores across Phase Four projects reflect this. The Multiverse Saga’s commercial performance has been increasingly disappointing relative to budget. The Marvels in 2023 lost approximately seventy million dollars on a two-hundred-seventy-four-million-dollar production budget.
Quantumania underperformed expectations. Black Widow and Eternals received negative-to-mixed audience response. The pattern isn’t random. It reflects an audience that was promised one kind of franchise and was given a different kind without consent.
The Financial Success Of Multiverse Films And Why It Doesn’t Save The Franchise
A common defense of the MCU’s multiverse pivot points to the financial success of specific multiverse-centered films. Spider-Man: No Way Home grossed nearly two billion dollars. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness grossed approximately nine hundred fifty-five million. Deadpool & Wolverine grossed approximately one and a third billion. These are commercial successes by any reasonable standard. The argument runs that multiverse storytelling is therefore commercially viable and that critics complaining about consequence removal are missing what the audience wants.
The argument misses what these specific films are doing. Each of the highest-grossing multiverse films delivers nostalgia through the multiverse mechanism. No Way Home delivers Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker variants. Multiverse of Madness delivers Patrick Stewart’s Professor X and John Krasinski’s Reed Richards. Deadpool & Wolverine delivers Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine. The audience is showing up for the nostalgia. The multiverse is the delivery vehicle for legacy character appearances that the audience wants.
Films that deploy the multiverse without legacy character appearances (Quantumania, The Marvels) have performed catastrophically.
This pattern reveals what the multiverse is accomplishing in the MCU. It’s not building a sustainable storytelling foundation for the next phase of the franchise. It’s providing a mechanism for one-time nostalgia events that monetize legacy fandoms from defunct or adjacent franchises. The multiverse can’t sustain a franchise because it’s no edges. The legacy character appearances can’t be repeated indefinitely. Once the obvious legacy characters have appeared, the multiverse becomes a structural device with no remaining payoff content.
The Phase Five projects that have attempted to work in multiverse tone without major legacy appearances are the ones that have failed commercially. The pattern is consistent.
The Connection To The Time-Travel Problem
Time-travel and the multiverse are structurally related plot devices that both produce consequence-removal as a side effect. The MCU’s adoption of time travel in Endgame opened the door to the multiverse adoption in later films because both devices work on the same principle: events that have occurred can be undone, modified, or rerouted through narrative mechanisms that bypass the consequences the events should have generated.
Endgame’s time-travel rules attempted to preserve consequence by establishing that the Avengers’ visits to past events created branch timelines instead of modifying the main timeline. The rule is internally coherent but generates the multiverse as a by-product. Each time the Avengers travel back in time and act in the past, they create a new branch timeline.
The branches are real universes with real characters. The multiverse the Loki series and later films explore is the direct consequence of the time-travel rules Endgame established.
The Stones-as-spine collapsed at the moment of the time-travel solution and the multiverse-as-no-spine replaced it across the next phase.
The decision to use time travel in Endgame was the seed of the multiverse problem in Phase Four. It was made because time travel was the only mechanism that allowed the Avengers to undo the Snap. The Snap had to be undone because the franchise was unwilling to commit to the consequences of leaving the Snap in place. The unwillingness to commit to consequences in 2019 produced the consequence-removal architecture of 2021 onward.
The MCU’s central problem is that the franchise wanted the dramatic weight of the Snap without the storytelling cost of letting the Snap stand. The time-travel solution avoided the cost in the short term and generated the multiverse infrastructure in the long term. I’d have let the Snap stand. Half the universe gone, and a next phase about the people left behind living with it, is a franchise I’d have been first in line for.
What The Multiverse Cannot Do
The spine of a serialized franchise can’t be the multiverse because it’s no end-state. The Infinity Stones had an end-state: all six collected, the universe-balancing snap, the climactic confrontation. The end-state gave the franchise its trajectory. The multiverse has no equivalent end-state.
There’s no point at which the multiverse is “completed.” There’s no point at which the multiverse storyline could resolve into a payoff comparable to the Endgame finale. The structure has no edges because the multiverse premise is functionally infinite.
Marvel Studios has attempted to manufacture an end-state through the Kang the Conqueror character introduced in Quantumania.
Marvel Studios intended Kang to function as the multiverse’s analog to Thanos, with the climactic Phase Six film delivering an Avengers vs Kang confrontation comparable to Infinity War and Endgame. The strategy collapsed when actor Jonathan Majors was convicted of misdemeanor assault and harassment in late 2023 and Marvel Studios later terminated his contract. The franchise lost its central multiverse antagonist mid-saga.
The replacement plans involving Robert Downey Jr.’s return as Doctor Doom are the franchise admitting that the multiverse storyline can’t be made to work without recycling the Stark legacy. The Doom casting is itself a multiverse mechanism, with Downey playing a different character, and it returns the most successful actor of the original franchise to cover for everything since. I find it embarrassing. Downey gave Marvel a decade of the best work in the franchise, and they’ve brought him back as somebody else to paper over their own mistakes.
Another thing the multiverse can’t do is what the Infinity Stones did because the multiverse premise is about possibility instead of about fact. The Stones were facts. They existed. They could be collected. They’d effects. The multiverse is possibilities. Alternate universes might contain anything. Anything can happen because anything is possible. The premise allows the franchise to introduce any character, undo any plot, retcon any history, and reverse any consequence. The same capacity that makes the multiverse useful for fan service makes it useless for serialized drama. Drama requires constraint.
Constraint is what the multiverse removes. The franchise built on constraint can’t survive the transition to a premise that removes it.
The Comic Book Lesson The MCU Should Have Learned
Comic book publishers have known for decades that the multiverse is a device to use sparingly and at specific moments instead of as a continuous storytelling foundation.
DC Comics produces its Crisis on Infinite Earths events once every fifteen to twenty years as continuity-reset mechanisms instead of as ongoing storytelling premises. Marvel Comics’ Secret Wars events occur with similar frequency. The publishers understand that the multiverse is end-of-franchise material that allows them to reset and continue with simpler continuities.
Using the multiverse as the continuous spine of an ongoing storyline isn’t how either major comic publisher works and isn’t how the device functions effectively.
The MCU adopted the multiverse as continuous spine instead of as occasional reset. The decision was either misunderstanding of how the device works or active denial of the limitations. The result has been continuous structural problems that the franchise has been unable to resolve. Phase Four collapsed. Phase Five is underperforming. The path forward involves either committing to the multiverse and accepting that the franchise will continue declining or executing a continuity reset that returns the franchise to finite stakes.
Marvel Studios has signaled possible direction toward the second option through the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars films. That may attempt to use the multiverse premise to reset the continuity back to something more manageable. Whether the execution will work is an open question. The damage already done is permanent.
What The Audience Came For
The audience that built the MCU into the largest film franchise in history came for serialized drama with accumulating consequence.
The audience came for characters whose decisions mattered across films. The audience came for stakes that had weight because the stakes were finite. The audience came for the experience of watching a long story develop across a decade of theatrical releases. The audience didn’t come for comic book conventions imported wholesale into a serialized cinematic franchise.
The MCU’s adoption of multiverse storytelling has alienated portions of this audience and produced the audience-score declines that define Phase Four and Phase Five. The financial performance of specific multiverse films has obscured this trend because nostalgia-driven multiverse films can still generate enormous box office on the strength of legacy character appearances. The underlying audience trust in the franchise has eroded considerably. The MCU that emerged from Endgame had spent a decade building audience investment.
The MCU that exists in 2026 has spent five years systematically dismantling that investment in service of a storytelling premise that the audience didn’t request and doesn’t especially want.
In the same sense that comic book continuity resets destroy fictional universes, the multiverse destroyed the MCU: by removing the consequences that gave the previous decade of storytelling its weight. The franchise can continue making films and generating revenue.
The franchise can’t recover the kind of audience investment that defined its peak years. That investment depended on permanence and permanence is exactly what the multiverse removes. The MCU traded the most valuable thing it had built for short-term commercial gain through nostalgia delivery.
I don’t expect Marvel to fix this, and it’s a loss, because the Infinity Saga proved a studio could build a story with real consequences at that scale.
They threw the proof away for Tobey Maguire cameos and a Wolverine resurrection. Doomsday and Secret Wars might reset things. I’ll believe it when a death in one of these films stays a death.
See also: The Snap, The Blip, And The Catastrophe The MCU Refused To Show, the companion essay on the structural decisions that produced the multiverse problem in the first place.
