Avengers End Game gave us the revelation that a past version of Loki had escaped and therefore wouldn’t be as dead as he seemed to be after the opening scenes of the Avengers Infinity War.
Time travel had given us a Loki that had cheated death.
It would then come in the Loki show that this was more than just time travel escape and that this Loki and others we would meet would count as variants where time had skewed in different directions and created branch time lines.
We were teased that there may be some Multiverse stuff going on during Spider-Man far From Home when Mysterio says he’s from the multiverse,
but even though what he said does line up with what fans know about the multiverse,
it turned out to be a bait and switch and was just a lie and he wasn’t really from another dimension.
And doing this shows how unthought out Marvel were going to be with the Multiverse.
Mysterio AKA Quintin Beck said he was from Earth 833 and called Tom Holland’s world Earth 616…which fans from the comic will know is the main Earth to represent our Earth in the Marvel comics and the MCU…so,
what? Did Mysterio just happen to guess that our own Earth would be designated as Earth 616? This was very sloppy writing as at best to make this make sense,
they would have to clarify that when our Earth is later designated as Earth 616 it was only done because we’d already got used to naming it such because it’s what a con man once called it.
But then the film ended with the return of JK Simmons as an alternative J Jonah Jameson,
and people speculated how this could be.
The best explanation given at the time was that Sony and Marvel felt no one else could play the character,
and to some degree that was true as we went through two Amazing Spider-Man films without the introduction of a different actor playing the head of the Daily Bugel.
But at the time fans just thought Simmons was cast as a different version of the same character,
and this was true,
but it didn’t come across as it being multiverse related,
but more like when Judy Dench played M in James Bond movies with both Peirce Brosnan and Daniel Craig.
Same actor.
Same character,
but just a different version of the character.
The first real taste of fun with the multiverse did come in Wandavision which introduced Evan Peters as a variant of Wanda’s dead brother Pietro,
aka Quicksilver.
This could have been seen as a recasting from the previous version which was killed in Avengers Age of Ultron,
but the fact was that Evan Peters had played Peter Maximoff in the Fox X-Men movies and so at this moment,
things suddenly became very exciting for Marvel MCU and Fox X-Men fans as it opened the doors to the possibilities of any or all of the X-Men actors from the past twenty years of films coming over to be in the MCU…except this was completely undermined within Wandavision itself and was therefore something of a non starter.
Fans were excited to see the Fox X-Men Quicksilver in the MCU,
but within two episodes they snatched it back and explained that he wasn’t really Quicksilver…even though it was played by the actor who played Quicksilver and he was just under a spell to think he was,
but was in fact a dude called Ralph Boner…this was a big let down and felt an insult for those who were excited for the X-Men to join the MCU.
Instead of us thinking who will be next? James McAvoy,
Jennifer Lawrence, etc…no,
it felt like a slap in the face and the MCU saying, nah those X-Men who you’ve watched the last bunch of years…they’re just a boner joke to us.
But when people weren’t happy, they did try to downplay it and say fans just needed to be patient because the true multiverse was coming.
Which is crazy, because it’s saying that the actor who played Quicksilver coming in and playing Quicksilver wasn’t in fact the Multiverse at the dawn of when they are starting the multiverse…what?
But then of course, the Multiverse then started properly with Spider-Man No Way Home…expect it didn’t stop properly then either.
Spider-Man No Way Home.
Love that film. Bringing back Toby Maguire. Bringing back Andrew Garfield and making him the best Spider-Man in it even though he had up until that point been the worst of the Spider-Men – turns out it was just weaker writing where they made him too cocky and angsty.
And bringing back all the Sony Spider-Man villains from two separate Spider-Man universes.
And of course, we do know that the whole reason the multiverse is even a thing now is because Sony hit gold by doing the Spider-verse before Marvel shown any indication of doing it at all.
If you remember, in Spider-Man No Way Home, it was explained that Peter Parker wanted everyone to forget that he was Spider-Man and sought the help of Doctor Strange to achieve this who used magic that went wrong and instead brought a bunch of people who knew that Peter Parker was Spider-Man from other universes…and brought them in the moment before they died…even though this was inconsistent as not all of them died,
and so why then did it bring in the actual Spider-Men,
and why did we get a post credits scene where Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock was in it,
but then before ethe end of his scene was sent back into the Venom universe…which Sony failed to do anything with at all in Venom The Last Dance.
