*Blanket spoiler warning for Marvel and DC movies, including the recently-released The Flash.*
I get embarrassingly sentimental watching superhero movies. Wonder Woman climbing out of a trench into no man’s land, Spider-Man heartbroken over poor dead Uncle Ben, all those excruciatingly corny camera swoops when the Avengers assemble mid-battle to take down whichever robot crocodiles are threatening the fabric of reality. I know that most of these films are just self-congratulatory circle-jerks, a schmaltzy celebration of military heroism dressed up in lycra onesies and snappy quips—and I still cannot help enjoying them.
However—and this isn’t a remotely hot take—the genre is getting somewhat tiring. I’ve been thinking about what it is that’s been missing for me about recent Marvel and DC releases. I went to see The Flash (2023) this week, in which the eponymous superhero uses his lightning-speed to go back in time and save his mother from being murdered, leading to a tangling of time streams and the fracturing of the multiverse. So far, so standard. It’s becoming increasingly rare to see a superhero film that doesn’t have some element of time-travel and/or universe-hopping, which opens up novel possibilities for protagonists battling or bantering with future, past, and parallel selves.
At least, it used to be novel. I remember seeing Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) in the cinema when it came out; I’d managed not to see any spoilers beforehand, so had no idea there was going to be a crossover of realities that saw villains from other franchises return, Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield teaming up with Tom Holland in a Spider-Man supergroup. (I thought about calling them Atomic Bitten but it was a radioactive spider that bit Peter Parker, not an atomic one. Pestiny’s Child doesn’t work because spiders are not widely considered to be pests. I tried.) When Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire stepped through interdimensional portals, I barely reacted. I hadn’t been expecting it, and yet as soon as it happened, I was like, well, of course.
The same thing happened when I watched The Flash (a film that already can’t help but have a pretty sour taste given controversies linked to its lead actor, Ezra Miller). The Flash ends up in the wrong timeline alongside a younger version of himself, and an entirely different Bruce Wayne to the one he knows—instead of slick-suited Ben Affleck, he’s a feral-looking recluse played by some guy called Michael Keaton.
Keaton’s return to playing Batman has been widely publicised, his iconic ‘I’m Batman’ growl appearing in trailers for the movie; so this wasn’t meant to be a ta-da! moment in the film. He reprises the role with wry and charismatic appeal (but then, I would say that). The collapse of the multiverse is further illustrated in later scenes, in which each universe appears as an enormous floating orb showing archive footage from DC days gone by, including George Reeves and Adam West as Batman and Superman in the fifties and sixties respectively.
In the final scene, the Flash has returned to his own reality, reassuring Bruce Wayne over the phone that he has mended the crumbling multiverse. Wayne announces he is pulling up in a car, gets out, emerges from behind reporters, and lo and behold—it’s George Clooney. Unexpected, but once again: well, of course.
As I said, I’m a sucker for superhero films; I beamed when I saw Clooney’s Bruce Wayne stride out in his aviators, I lapped up Keaton’s every line, and Maguire, Garfield, and Holland’s collaborative Threeter Parker warmed the cockles of my heart. But Marvel and DC filmmakers have forfeited the element of surprise by deploying the multiverse trope so often and predictably that it doesn’t serve as a twist anymore.
Elsewhere in the MCU, it’s done slightly differently. The characters of Doctor Strange and Loki do not have an archive of TV and film performances that are known and enjoyed by fans on the same scale as those given by Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hiddleston respectively; so when they are the main characters in yet another episode of The Multiverse Has Been Upset Again (will no-one leave the poor multiverse alone), there isn’t really an option to wheel out an older actor to reprise their role for nostalgia kicks.
Both Loki (2021) and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) instead play alternate universes for clownish comic effect. Loki meets a gang of his variants that includes an alligator in a horned coronet, and Richard E. Grant dressed like he’s auditioning for the Muppets. Doctor Strange stands in a parallel universe before a pick-and-mix Illuminati panel that features John Krasinski as a variant of Mr Fantastic, and Patrick Stewart reprising his role as Charles Xavier.* I don’t dislike these scenes, I even find them charming and gently humorous; but they are, I repeat, no longer surprising. The alternate reality model is now so commonplace in superhero films that it is losing its novelty; five years from now we could see Wonder Woman travel to a parallel universe where her variant is played by Miriam Margoyles, and I don’t think it would even register as a shock (although I would categorically love to see it).
(*On the subject of Professor X, I suppose X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) also fits into this discussion, given how it blends the X-Men cast of the aughts with the cast of the 2010s. Its characters travel back and forth along a single timeline in a way that seems simple and almost quaint compared to the multiversal parkour that has now become the norm in comic-book films. I won’t be digging into it in any more detail right now because I have not seen it in years and this post is already a lot longer than anticipated.)
Perhaps a less cynical argument could be made that the folks at Marvel and DC Studios want to pay fitting tribute to the old guard of superhero veterans. When asked why he chose to return as Batman in The Flash, Michael Keaton made comments such as ‘It seemed like fun,’ and ‘It’s cool to drop in,’ and ‘why not?’—and it was very fun and cool to have him drop in, and why not indeed? Having made a cameo in WW84, Lynda Carter was at one point meant to be returning in a larger role for the third DCEU Wonder Woman movie (although with the recent DC restructuring under James Gunn, this movie is reportedly dead in the water). There is a rich archive of superhero movie performances that deserve to be recognised and brought to the attention of a new generation of moviegoers. What’s more, the two animated Spider-verse films have shown imagination and showcased incredible artistry in their depictions of hundreds of members of the multiversal Spider Society (with a nice little nod to this meme), drawing from comic-book and cartoon representations spanning decades.
However. We’re now in phase five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe; there are over thirty films (with more announced and in production) and I frankly do not know how many spin-off series (too many). The DC Extended Universe comes in at a more modest fourteen films to date, and a few longer-running spin-off series that seem very slightly less scattergunned than Marvel’s output. Both these studio titans of comic-book adaptation seem to be very aware that the landscape is oversaturated, and as a result are using the concept of the multiverse as a way of either getting cheap laughs (imagine Thor meets himself in an alternate reality and he’s played by Danny Dyer!) or manipulating audience nostalgia by having their childhood icons dress up in tight-fitting body armour and dance for them again.
Nostalgic cameos, twisted time streams, quirky bits in a parallel universe—these aren’t bad things. In small doses, they’re extremely enjoyable; the problem is that movie studios have overloaded audiences like a parent who catches their teenage child smoking and makes them smoke a whole pack so they’ll never enjoy it again. (This is probably a dated simile since the kids are all into vaping now.) (‘The kids’? Am I eighty years old?) The novelty these tropes would have had, had they been deployed sparingly, has slowly dissipated through overuse; the multiverse has become a multi-curse. Deadpool 3 could summon the ghost of Jimi Hendrix to do a cameo and I still do not think it would surprise me.
good strong words 
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