The MCU’s multiverse has been a hot topic of conversation in the superhero world since the concept was first introduced to the franchise back in 2019, when Avengers: Endgame broke the hearts of millions. The multiverse has come a long way since then, serving as the main focus of Phase 4 and will now seemingly drive the stories created for Phase 5 and Phase 6.
As all Marvel fans now know, there are infinite timelines in the MCU multiverse, meaning anything can (and probably will) happen. This definitely opens the door to some incredible possibilities, but no story is without its flaws. Creating the multiverse means almost every Marvel inspired movie over the last 20 years is now officially MCU canon, which leads to three major problems.
Potential for Plot Holes
One of the biggest problems behind making everything canon is that it creates too much potential for inexplicable plot holes that are never patched up and fixed. When content is made canon in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it becomes part of the Earth-616 world fans have been watching since the early 2000s when the franchise was created.
This leads to far too many inconsistencies across all the movies and Disney Plus shows that have been produced so far. A lot of Marvel fans have been finding these discrepancies when it comes to the MCU’s multiverse rules, which innately leads to even more plot holes and makes it difficult for people to fully grasp the content.
Even in the early days of Phase 4 when the multiverse was just starting to manifest itself in the MCU, Marvel was setting up storylines that haven’t panned out the way they expected them to. For example, Loki taught viewers that the TVA is all about preserving the multiverse yet when Wanda starts to muck things up in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the TVA doesn’t show up at all.
The TVA never showed up in Spider-Man: No Way Home, either, when Strange and Peter were experimenting with dangerous spells that ultimately led to the collision of multiple universes in a highly irresponsible fashion. The TVA also seemed to ignore the events of Avengers: Endgame entirely, when the original 6 heroes sought out to gather their own set of infinity stones.
Loki did confirm that the Avengers’ hop through time was permitted by the TVA, but that doesn’t explain why all the other characters seem to be getting a free pass since their timeline meddling wasn’t done for the good of the universe. Overall, there’s simply a lot of information to grasp when it comes to understanding Marvel’s multiverse. So the more it continues to expand, the more confusing it will be to understand and the more room there is for storyline errors and plot holes.
Catch Up Chaos
Even if Marvel manages to fill every plot hole and simplify the complex rules of the multiverse, making everything canon means MCU fans will have a lot of content to keep up with. Marvel has become notorious for constantly interweaving all of its projects, planting Easter eggs, and using ensemble or team up projects to detail the origin stories of new characters before giving them their own projects.
Missing out on a single film or TV series can cause major confusion for viewers, so it’s sometimes difficult for even long-time Marvel fans to keep up with all the new content, even if they’ve been following the franchise since the very beginning.
Using the multiverse to make everything canon means those who are new to the MCU have a boatload of content to catch up on, and understanding what’s going on in the upcoming Phase 5 will require hours upon hours of watch time for new viewers that need to start from the very beginning.
The multiverse has expanded into other networks beyond just Marvel Studios, and has officially made films like Sony’s Venom and 20th Century Fox’s Deadpool part of the MCU canon. So not only does keeping up with the franchise require fans to watch all MCU movies and get a Disney Plus subscription to watch all Marvel Studios shows, viewers also have to stay up to date on the latest Marvel inspired films from other studios.
Lazy Writing
As mentioned, everything fans have seen from the MCU has taken place in the Earth-616 universe. Sony and 20th Century Fox studio movies aside, the MCU is only meant to follow one overarching storyline set on Earth-616, with some brief detours to other realms as seen in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.
There are plenty of issues with the MCU’s Earth-616 alone, but the inclusion of the multiverse could lead to Marvel Studios making some lazy writing decisions. The multiverse opens up all sorts of possibilities, such as uniting all three Spider-Man in No Way Home, which fans loved seeing back in 2021. And although that worked the first time, continuing to rely on such writing strategies for future films could easily become both boring and predictable.