Hit. Miss. Hit. Miss. Hit. Miss. The agonising anxiety comes full force, spreading through mind and body, encompassing the very soul. Occupying the brain. Surely a trip to the cinema shouldn’t be like this. Especially, for Marvel fans, a trip to see a Marvel film? Yet, for this Marvel fan, it is.
The once great Marvel Cinematic Universe, with a famous and successful Infinity Saga under its belt left some mighty shoes to fill for its encore. How could the Multiverse Saga possibly be better? Answer: it isn’t. It is, instead, the MCU’s half-fall from grace. Now, keeping it afloat, the franchise must borrow from other Marvel franchises.
A strong start
It’s safe to say that, despite some notable exceptions such as Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3, Kevin Feige’s second MCU saga has flopped.
All films with a multiversal plot have been either hit or miss. Films like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania were good, but their use of the multiverse didn’t feel very multiversal. It felt like we were staying in the same universe, just with a slight paint job and a few character tweaks and swaps here and there. Nothing felt mysterious or ultra-cosmic, like we were travelling to other universes, existing alongside the MCU but independently.
Only Loki came close, but it didn’t explore different universes – only branched timelines, the variants from them and the Time Variance Authority outside the multiverse. That is, of course, with two notable exceptions; Spiderman: No Way Home and now, Deadpool and Wolverine.
Multiverse of franchises
Sony, who owns the rights to Spider-Man, has been making films featuring the web-slinging Marvel character since before the birth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With reboots and spin-offs, multiple franchises/universes were created alongside, an arguably failed, universe of its own akin to the MCU. Only Tom Holland’s Spider-Man has any relation to the MCU.
This changed in Spider-Man: No Way Home when the latest Sony and Disney collaboration saw Peter Parker and Doctor Strange unleash the multiverse onto the MCU. Unlike other MCU multiverse-related films, Spider-Man: No Way Home utilised Sony’s other Spider-Man franchises and brought them into canon by portraying them as other universes. Deadpool and Wolverine did the same.
From the moment we enter film, we are in the mutant universe that we know from X-Men. But straightaway, we are greeted with a fight between Wade Wilson aka Deadpool and soldiers from the Time Variance Authority (TVA). The TVA, despite being an organisation outside all universes, is very much an MCU thing so to see it appear in Deadpool and Wolverine, set in a markedly different franchise and universe from the MCU, gives the viewers a proper taste of the multiverse as characters and concepts are brought in from separate franchises that, until now, we thought were impossible to crossover. That does the multiverse right and does it justice as well.
Beyond the fantasy
It isn’t just the characters that show us this difference and it isn’t just the settings either. It isn’t seeing Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock with Tom Holland’s MCU Spider-Man in Doctor Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum or seeing the X-Men universes’ Wade Wilson in the MCU’s TVA headquarters. It’s the writing.
Unlike with many MCU films, the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy a noticeable exception, Deadpool was written in a far darker and less PG manner. The swearing, violence, gore and sexual references felt like their usual Deadpool franchise and not at all like an MCU film. This, together with the breaking of the fourth wall that Deadpool likes to indulge in, truly highlights the differences in both real-world franchise and fictional universe. You know the differences, you can compare them and you can see them truly crossover as the walls between franchises break down, separating a more PG universe from one in which Ryan Reynolds had creative freedom.
Deadpool and Wolverine is not just a great movie on par with the first two but serves as proof that Spider-Man: Now Way Home’s use of different Marvel franchises is the only way they can successfully carry forward the Multiverse Saga. Deadpool himself broke the fourth wall in saying that it was miss after miss after miss but that film, alongside No Way Home, carries the saga. If Kevin Feige wants to save the saga and make a success of it, even in this late stage, he needs to borrow from the other franchises to show real and authentic multiversal crossovers.
