Marvel Studios has been plundering the Rick and Morty writers’ room for scripting talent in the past couple of years, and it’s been detrimental to the MCU’s development. In theory, Rick and Morty writers should be perfect for Marvel’s “Multiverse Saga.” The hit Adult Swim cartoon popularized the concept of the multiverse in the first place and provided plenty of mind-bending, thought-provoking interdimensional storylines. The creatives behind that show should be able to come up with some inventive ideas to expand the MCU’s multiverse and liven up its plotting. But they’ve just brought Rick and Morty’s weirdness and self-awareness over to Marvel without any of the depth and substance that make the series so ingenious.
Which Rick And Morty Writers Have Worked With Marvel?
Michael Waldron, Jeff Loveness, and Jessica Gao all wrote for Rick and Morty before being hired by Marvel Studios. Waldron wrote the Rick and Morty season 4 episode “The Old Man and the Seat,” in which Rick seeks revenge after finding out a trespasser has used his private toilet planet. Under Marvel, Waldron served as the creator and head writer on the first season of Loki and wrote the screenplay for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Loveness got his first Rick and Morty writing credit on the notorious season 4 episode “Claw and Hoarder: Special Ricktim’s Morty,” a rare miss for the series in which Morty gets a dragon in a clunky metaphor for slut-shaming. He went on to write or co-write the season 4 episodes “Never Ricking Morty,” “Promortyus,” and the iconic “The Vat of Acid Episode.” Loveness also worked on the season 5 premiere, “Mort Dinner Rick Andre,” and the season 5 finale, “Rickmurai Jack,” before being hired to pen the script for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
Gao got her first Rick and Morty writing credit on arguably the most renowned and beloved episode of the show’s entire run, season 3’s “Pickle Rick,” in which Rick turns himself into a pickle and has to figure out a way to get home when he's washed into a sewer. She went on to serve as the creator and head writer of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law for Marvel. Loveness has been hired to write Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Waldron has been hired to write Avengers: Secret Wars, so the two most important upcoming Marvel movies are in the hands of Rick and Morty writers. All of Marvel’s Rick and Morty hires have done some great work, but on the whole, their MCU writing shows that they’ve been more of a detriment to Marvel than a blessing.
Multiverse Of Madness Was Unfocused And Inconsistent
To be fair to Waldron, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness had to accommodate COVID-related delays, a last-minute change of director, and Spider-Man: No Way Home getting bumped up in the release schedule, so the fact that it manages to tell a coherent story at all is a miracle. But even taking those behind-the-scenes troubles into consideration, there are some fundamental problems with the Multiverse of Madness script. The Doctor Strange sequel highlighted the problem with giving a movie job to a TV writer. It’s not a tight three-act feature-film narrative; it’s a collection of disparate ideas crammed into a feature-length runtime. There are great individual sequences, like the Illuminati massacre and the Evil Dead-style final fight between zombified Strange and the Scarlet Witch, but there’s no cohesion between them.
Quantumania Was More Concerned With Silliness And Being Weird
After being hyped up as the beginning of a new dynasty, introducing the MCU’s next Thanos-sized big bad and taking a much darker turn than the average Ant-Man movie, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was a monumental disappointment. Part of the disappointment is that Loveness’ script felt more like a bloated adventure-of-the-week episode of television than a movie. The story was never in any danger of disrupting the status quo; no one has to sacrifice anything for the equilibrium to be restored. The Ant-Man family gets lost in the Quantum Realm, where Scott and Cassie contend with Kang in the A-plot and the Van Dynes aimlessly explore the microverse in the B-plot until they all meet up again for a by-the-numbers final battle. Instead of imbuing the narrative with real stakes or giving the characters an actual emotional journey to go on, Loveness was too busy filling the Quantum Realm with silly concepts and weird side characters. The broccoli person, the goofy M.O.D.O.K. redemption arc, the creature obsessed with holes, and the spaceship that Hank Pym steers by sticking his hands into jelly all feel like they were scooped off the cutting room floor from a weak Rick and Morty episode.
She-Hulk Got Way Too Meta
Of all the Marvel projects scripted by Rick and Morty writers, She-Hulk is arguably the strongest and most cohesive as a story and a character piece – but it’s still far from perfect. It got plenty of comedic mileage out of combining the mundane conflicts of a workplace sitcom with the high-stakes conflicts of a superhero show, and the fourth-wall-breaking was initially a welcome change from the norm. However, the series’ sly self-awareness quickly became a curse. She-Hulk really surprised audiences with how meta it got in the finale, as Jen Walters jumped across the Disney+ streaming library, marched into the offices of Marvel Studios, and demanded to see K.E.V.I.N. so she could make some on-the-spot rewrites. It was a lot of fun, but it may have gotten a little too meta for its own good. Jen threw out storylines that the writers had been building up for weeks and resolved all the conflicts with the snap of her fingers. It got points for subverting the usual Marvel formula, but it subverted the formula so much that it ended up not delivering a satisfying conclusion to the series. The finale set up a climactic battle, then skipped past the battle to the aftermath.