J.K. Simmons, antagonist and likely comedic relief of the upcoming Spider-Man: No Way Home, won an Oscar for his performance in Whiplash where he famously asked Miles Teller if he was rushing or dragging. It seems like after Marvel dragged the Infinity Saga out for far longer than it needed to, the Multiverse Saga is being rushed.
You would expect this era of the MCU to go a little bit faster, of course. While there are a few new stars to introduce, like Shang-Chi and The Eternals, most are being brought in via stories that are already in motion. Yelena in Black Widow, for example, or Ironheart in the upcoming Black Panther sequel. In the Infinity Saga, however, everyone needed to be kickstarted, and it wasn’t until the first Avengers movie that Infinity Stones - then just the Tesseract - played a major part in proceedings. Most heroes needed two solo flicks to even understand how the universe was pieced together.
While the faster pace might be expected, it feels like there’s a desperation to explore the multiverse as a concept before establishing the ground rules of how it operates as they did with the Infinity Stones. We didn’t begin with Thanos collecting each stone, we just had the Tesseract, which itself propelled many films forward before the others were introduced or even mentioned.
Now, just two movies post-Endgame (Far From Home and Black Widow), the MCU is diving headfirst into the multiverse in the Spider-Man trailer. Yes, Shang-Chi and Eternals will also be out before No Way Home takes us into the Spider-Verse, and there have been three TV shows, but Eternals will likely dabble in the multiverse and one of the TV shows, Loki, revolved heavily around it as well. That’s not to mention that the next film in line is Doctor Strange 2, which is subtitled ‘In the Multiverse of Madness’ and will star Elizabeth Olsen, likely tying WandaVision and Pietro/Ralph Boehner into the Multiverse Saga too.
It all feels very different to the Infinity Saga. While avid comic book readers could guess it was going to end with a collection of the Infinity Stones in one way or another, there was still an air of mystery. You have to suspend expectations a little bit in the MCU, and with comic book movies in general. Sure, occasionally James Gunn blows up half the cast of The Suicide Squad, but for the most part, the heroes win and the villains lose. Even in The Suicide Squad, once you get 15 minutes in and the carnage has happened, most of the heroes live to the end, and the villains end up dying. If you're looking for deep intrigue, this genre doesn’t have it. Still, at least it used to be about the dance. There was some build up. They dusted half the heroes. They bought you a drink first. With the Multiverse Saga, it's like all the decision makers at Marvel are desperate to get to the next Endgame. But we took more than 20 movies and almost a decade to get there the first time, and there were no supplementary television shows - the old spin-offs never reconnected to the main story - and their releases spaced much further apart.
Some huge clash, like involving Kang as the stand-in for Thanos, is heading our way in the Multiverse, but it needs time to blossom into something worth caring about. Hopefully, the initial exploration into the multiverse just takes us into one or two. The Maguire-Spider-Verse, the Garfield-Spider-Verse, and the X-Men-Verse seem like the obvious starting points, and if we just get those three until Loki season 2 expands upon them in a year or so's time, maybe things can continue at a consistent enough pace. Essentially, those three new multiverses would be the Tesseract, and in time, the other multiverses would become the Infinity Stones.
It doesn't need to move in exactly the same way. It can't, really. There are six Stones and infinite multiverses. But diving headfirst - literally, in the trailer - to all of those possibilities right at the start of the saga is unsustainable. It is already becoming difficult for casual fans to keep up, not least because so many projects are coming out in quick succession. Between now and Christmas there are three movies and a television series, all with key characters in them - Kate Bishop might even be the key to the whole saga.
The multiverse is a hugely exciting direction for Marvel to head in, but that excitement needs to be channelled. The multiverse may have infinite possibilities, but it does not have infinite potential. Marvel needs to allow this saga to grow organically instead of rushing to the finish line.