What Went Wrong With Marvel's Multiverse Saga?

When Jonathan Majors was arrested in 2023, Marvel suddenly had an enormous problem. He wasn't just playing another villain, he was Kang the Conqueror, the central antagonist of Marvel's entire multiverse saga, with the next Avengers movie literally named after him. Following his arrest, Marvel dropped Majors, abandoned the Kang Dynasty, and brought back Robert Downey Jr. to play Doctor Doom instead.

In a surprising admission, Kevin Feige later revealed that Marvel had already begun questioning Kang long before Majors' arrest, realizing something wasn't working. Quantumania had underperformed, one of the biggest box office disasters in MCU history, and audiences who once treated every Marvel release like a must-see event were increasingly choosing to stay home.

So while replacing Kang with Doctor Doom might have solved Marvel's villain problem, it raised a much bigger question for me: was the multiverse itself the problem? To find out, I want to look at what went wrong with the multiverse.

Wolverine's death in Logan got undone by Deadpool and Wolverine

In 2017, Hugh Jackman finally said goodbye to Wolverine after playing the character for nearly 17 years. Rather than going out in another enormous superhero spectacle, Logan gave him a much smaller, more intimate send-off about an aging, broken-down Wolverine who had lost virtually everything. His healing powers were failing, Professor X was dying, and the X-Men were essentially gone. But in helping a young mutant named Laura and a group of children escape to safety, Logan found something worth fighting for again, and sacrificed his life to save them.

The movie ends with Laura burying him in the woods, turning the cross on his grave into an X, and walking away. It was a beautiful ending to one of the most iconic superhero characters in cinema, bringing nearly two decades of storytelling to a definitive conclusion. Wolverine was dead, Hugh Jackman was retiring from the role, and it genuinely felt like the end of an era.

Until, of course, he came back for Deadpool and Wolverine. While this was a variant from another timeline, it still cheapened what was supposed to be a definitive ending to the character. Because if you can simply bring back another version of a character whenever they die, why should audiences ever believe that death is permanent? That removes one of the most powerful sources of tension in storytelling: when a character is in danger, we're supposed to fear that we might actually lose them. But if there's always another version waiting somewhere in the multiverse, that threat becomes a lot less frightening.

Loki and Gamora's deaths in Infinity War lost their weight

This is exactly what happened with Loki. In Infinity War, Loki attempts to save his brother by attacking Thanos, only to have his neck snapped right in front of Thor. His shocking death immediately established just how powerful and dangerous Thanos was, fueled Thor's desperate quest for vengeance, and demonstrated how far the two brothers had come. His death had meaning, consequences, and brought his character arc to a fitting conclusion.

Except just a few years later, Loki was back starring in his own Disney Plus series, as Marvel once again got around the inconvenient problem of the character being dead by introducing a variant. Same goes for Gamora, whose death in Infinity War was one of the film's most devastating, only for another version of her to show up in Endgame. Both characters had meaningful deaths that carried enormous emotional consequences, only for Marvel to find a convenient loophole to bring them back without technically resurrecting them.

Marvel can argue that these are technically different characters, but that distinction doesn't change the fact that audiences are seeing the same actors playing the same superheroes again. It undermines the finality of their deaths and removes one of the most fundamental sources of tension in storytelling: the possibility that we might actually lose someone we care about.

The bigger the stakes get, the harder they are to feel

There's a strange irony to all of this. While the multiverse has made individual characters' deaths feel increasingly inconsequential, it's also allowed Marvel to raise the stakes to absolutely ridiculous levels. At first, superheroes were fighting to save a city, then an entire planet, then the universe itself. Now with the multiverse, we're dealing with threats that could potentially destroy every universe in existence. But does threatening an infinite number of realities actually make a story more compelling? The bigger the threats become, the more abstract they get, and the harder it becomes for audiences to actually care about what's happening.

In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, we discover that an alternate version of Strange accidentally caused an incursion that completely destroyed another universe, killing every single person in it. An entire reality with potentially trillions of people has been completely wiped from existence, and yet the revelation barely registers emotionally because we have no connection to that reality or anyone living in it. It's supposed to be an unimaginable, horrific event, but the scale is so enormous and the concept so abstract that it becomes difficult to comprehend, let alone care about.

This is why I think the best stakes in superhero movies are often much smaller and more personal, like in Captain America: Civil War. What makes its climax so devastating isn't the fate of the world, it's Tony Stark discovering that Bucky murdered his parents and that Steve Rogers knew about it. These characters we spent years getting to know are beating each other up, and we care because we understand exactly what they stand to lose: their friendships, their trust, and the relationships they spent years building. An entire universe isn't in danger, but the stakes feel enormous because they're personal.

The multiverse gives characters a convenient escape from consequences

The multiverse introduces yet another problem. If a villain actually succeeds in destroying a planet or an entire universe, what's stopping the surviving characters from simply escaping into another reality and picking up where they left off? Once you've established that alternate realities exist and that traveling between them is possible, you've introduced another convenient way to escape the consequences of catastrophic failure.

Losing your entire world should be the ultimate tragedy, but if there's another Earth out there with the same cities, the same people, and alternate versions of everyone you've ever known, then even the destruction of an entire universe doesn't necessarily have to be the end of the story. The multiverse allows writers to make the threats infinitely larger while simultaneously giving them more ways to undo or escape the consequences. Destroying a trillion universes doesn't mean much if you don't care about a single person living in them.

Cameos have replaced storytelling as the biggest draw

Rather than using the multiverse to introduce interesting new characters and explore entirely different worlds, Marvel has increasingly used it as an excuse to bring back actors and characters audiences already recognize. Suddenly, the biggest question surrounding these movies isn't necessarily what's going to happen next, but who's going to show up. Will Tobey Maguire return as Spider-Man? Will Wesley Snipes return as Blade? Could Chris Evans come back as Captain America? The actual story becomes secondary to the possibility of seeing a familiar face walk through a portal accompanied by an enormous music cue designed to make audiences lose their minds.

This isn't to say bringing back familiar characters can't work. Spider-Man: No Way Home is a great example of how to do it properly. When Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire returned, they didn't simply show up, wave at the camera, and disappear. Their experiences helped Tom Holland's Peter Parker navigate his own grief and prevent him from making the same mistakes they did. When Garfield saves MJ after failing to save Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, it's a genuinely moving moment because it gives his character a chance to confront one of the greatest tragedies of his life.

But more often than not, these returns are more like glorified cameos meant to elicit a cheap reaction. There's nothing inherently wrong with nostalgia or bringing back loved characters, but recognition isn't a substitute for storytelling. Seeing an actor you recognize can generate a huge reaction in a theater, but that excitement is usually fleeting. Once the surprise wears off, you're left with the actual movie, and if those appearances don't serve the characters or advance the story, then what was the point?

The Infinity Saga built toward something, the Multiverse Saga never quite did

Perhaps the biggest difference between the Infinity Saga and the Multiverse Saga is that the Infinity Saga actually felt like it was building towards something. Marvel gradually introduced the Infinity Stones as powerful objects that served as central plot devices in several movies, and audiences gradually learned what these objects were, what they could do, and how dangerous they were. Thanos was first teased at the end of The Avengers, then appeared in Guardians of the Galaxy manipulating Ronan into retrieving a stone, then put on the Infinity Gauntlet in the post credit scene of Age of Ultron. By the time Infinity War arrived, Marvel had spent years building toward the confrontation.

Compare that to the Multiverse Saga. The Loki series on Disney Plus did most of the heavy lifting, introducing the TVA, Kang, and the threat of another multiversal war. No Way Home explored the consequences of bringing characters from different universes together, Multiverse of Madness introduced incursions and the destruction of entire realities, and Quantumania finally brought Kang to the big screen, only to have him defeated by Ant-Man before introducing an entire council of alternate Kangs in the post credit scene. All of these projects were supposedly building toward the same crossover, but without Kang, there's no longer a particularly clear objective connecting them.

Doom hasn't been built up throughout these movies. He wasn't secretly orchestrating events behind the scenes, nor had Marvel spent years establishing his motivations or gradually revealing his larger plan. He wasn't even a character in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, appearing only briefly in a mid-credit scene with Franklin Richards, without so much as a line of dialogue. And now he's supposed to be the central villain in the next Avengers movie. That's like if the back of Thanos's head had first been introduced in a post credit scene of Ragnarok, with the character given no dialogue.

That ultimately exposes the biggest problem with the Multiverse Saga for me. Marvel spent years introducing alternate timelines, variants, and increasingly enormous threats, but never established the same clear narrative through-line that made the Infinity Saga feel like one interconnected story. When Kang was abandoned, the one character who was supposed to tie everything together disappeared with him. Instead of the culmination of years of carefully established storytelling, Doomsday now has the difficult task of introducing an entirely new central villain while simultaneously trying to bring all of these disparate storylines together in one enormous crossover.

So did the multiverse make Marvel's stories bigger, or did it just make them feel smaller?