And by the end of Spider-Man No Way Home we had the variant character sent back to their own universes, so it kinda said this was the only time we’re getting Toby and Andrew back as Peter Parker, so whilst this was fun, don’t expect them to tangle with Hulk or Thor or any non Spider-Man character.
Now, of course they could still come back, but instead of establishing a way for them to continue having a presence in the MCU, they would have to have some convoluted explanation that they are coming back into the MCU universe, which is Earth 616.
And let’s be clear…seeing the multiverse of Spider-Man films with Tom, Tobey and Andrew was a blast, and they also gave a movie with Green Goblin, Dock Ock, Lizard, Sandman and Electro – so many villains…but no variant Mary Jane…shame.
The point is,
this movie showed us the potential of the Multiverse and was a massive hit.
Fans were ready for more…and in my opinion,
Spider-Man No Way Home was been the only truly good use of the Multiverse concept until the release of Deadpool and Wolverine…but we’ll get to that later and explore if it was actually anywhere near as good as what was done in Spider-Man No Way Home…because it wasn’t.
So, after the bait and switches of Spider-Man Far From Home, and Wandavision, we did fully get the multiverse explored in Loki.
But Loki as a TV series really didn’t have the budget to explore all the alternative versions of main MCU characters that we had hoped.
And to be honest, as a TV show, we didn’t really expect from it.
The show did establish the rules of the multiverse and introduce us to the Time Variant Authority which are some between universe bureaucracy who file paperwork and police the multiverse to make sure that there is essentially only one universe which is known as the sacred timeline…
Which didn’t make any sense as we now knew that the Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire time lines existed, and even though it was bait and switch, the Fox X-Men universe existed with Quicksilver being brought in for Wandavision.
And then in practice we were only really given variants of Loki in the show.
We got girl Loki, black Loki, Kid Loki, old Loki, alligator Loki…oh and we did get a brief glimpse of Throg which was a frog variant of Thor.
So Loki didn’t deliver on the multiverse really either.
It’s big tease was that it introduced us to He Who Remains,
played by Jonathan Majors as a variant of Kang the Conqueror who Marvel intended to set up as the next Big Bad on a Thanos level.
But with the end of the story of season one of Loki we had girl Loki kill He Who Remains and this would mean that with no one keeping the sacred timeline as the only timeline,
the multiverse was no in effect and we’d start to get a flood of multiverse leakages and stories in the films and Disney Plus shows to follow…but that isn’t what happened.
We got another Kang variant in Ant Man and the Wasp Quantumania,
but being set in the Quantum Realm it didn’t really feel like that was another variant as Antman and fam going in and out of the quantum realm is still directly linked into Earth 616, so I assume there is just another quantum realm in every universe…although who knows, maybe you can go between dimensions if you go through the quantum realm…I’m not really sure to be honest…but it doesn’t seem that way.
Chronologically we did get the animated What If show before Antman 3 and we should talk about it, but as it was just an animated show set entirely in different earths from the MCU Earth 616 we will come back to it later. It has plenty we could discuss, but thus far it hasn’t got direct connection to the ongoing MCU story.
The project everyone was waiting for was Doctor Strange 2 which was subtitled Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
So yeah, we expected the Multiverse…and Marvel really fumbled it.
