The multiverse, the idea of different universes existing simultaneously, has been a plot device on screen and in comics for years. The success of the recent Deadpool & Wolverine, which has already grossed $1 billion (£778,180,000) at the box office, and the excitement surrounding Iron Man actor Robert Downey Jr.’s impending return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) – this time as the villainous Doctor Doom – show that the phenomenon is unlikely to go away any time soon.
You could trace it back to Sliding Doors (1998), which switches between two different realities and shows how a woman’s life drifts apart by accident. Or you could go further, to It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), which shows a different, darker reality if James Stewart’s character George had died in infancy. Or even to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, where the Ghost of Christmas to Come shows Scrooge a different, darker reality in which he doesn’t change his life.
Parallel worlds were first featured on television in a 1963 episode of “The Twilight Zone” – and in a 1967 episode of “Star Trek,” Leonard Nimoy played an evil version of Spock from another reality, who was primarily recognizable by his beard.
As Marvel fans know, given Downey Jr.’s notoriety as Tony Stark/Iron Man, it’s extremely likely that his new role as Doctor Doom will cause the two worlds (or multiverses) to collide in some way. But we don’t yet know how Downey Jr.’s return to the MCU will translate to him playing a villain.
Maybe in this parallel universe, Tony Stark became evil because of other choices in his life. Or maybe he’s playing a completely different character – Doctor Doom, posing as Iron Man to shock or charm the characters who trust him.
Doom is traditionally a Fantastic Four villain, and so could make his first appearance in this upcoming film. As Mark Hibbert, writer of Data and Doctor Doom (2024), suggests, it would not be out of character for Doom to “swap bodies with the original Tony Stark” and “travel back in time to before he died fighting Thanos.”
Doom often surrounds himself with robot doppelgängers (as seen on stage at San Diego Comic-Com when Downey’s casting was announced), so it’s not a total surprise that this character looks like a different character.
Multiverse narratives and dark storylines
Multiverses offer the potential for infinite narrative freedom. That means you get access to all the possibilities and alternatives to the story’s mistakes – but multiverse stories rarely seem to work that way.
The trope can be found in a variety of genres and media, from British comics such as Bryan Talbot’s Luther Arkwright saga (1978–2022) to novels such as Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The Doors to Eden (2020) and Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion series (1962–2012), which coined the term.
Entering the multiverse is generally disturbing and unsettling at best, and downright dangerous and murderous at worst, as in Sarah Pinsker’s 2017 novella And Then There Were (N-One).
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In Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett’s The Long Earth series (2012), travel through the multiverse leads to colonization. In MR Carey’s Infinity Gate (2023), it enables corporate greed and environmental violence on an unprecedented scale. As Carey’s protagonist Essien Nkanika discovers, strangeness and familiarity are intertwined in the multiverse, creating a sense of sickening pressure and emotional anxiety.
Those who visit parallel worlds usually return traumatized and changed – sometimes they even become the monster they once hunted or tried to escape from.
Often the other world is portrayed as an uncanny experience – Sigmund Freud’s term for the familiar becoming strange, an effect that “produces fear and creeping horror”. How could it be otherwise? There is the danger of encountering another version of oneself – the ultimate doppelgänger.
This notion signals the collapse of the idea of a single self, as the multiverse traveler suffers a deep sense of otherness and lostness. These parallel worlds are disturbingly connected to our own, showing us our own world replaced and displaced, where familiar landscapes hide unknown threats. This theme is explored in Brian Crouch’s 2016 novel Dark Matter and its 2022 TV adaptation, in which a doppelgänger from a parallel world can steal your life.
It’s not surprising that superheroes lend themselves so well to this scenario. These characters are already split personalities, with the superhero identity often pitted against the alter ego – think of the powerful Superman versus the weak Clark Kent, the brash Spiderman versus the timid Peter Parker, the obsessive and proactive Batman versus the lazy Bruce Wayne.
Read more: Deadpool & Wolverine is fun for die-hard Marvel fans – but won’t save the MCU
Deadpool & Wolverine also comments on the phenomenon of the same actor playing different characters in the same multiverse. In the film, Chris Evans plays two characters. This is used first for surprise, then for comedy, and finally for provocation.
This is not a new phenomenon. DC Comics was the first to tackle it in 1961, when The Flash met a doppelgänger from an alternate reality. On television, Brandon Routh played both The Atom and Superman in a 2019 episode of Batwoman, which also featured several Clark Kents.
In the animated series Rick and Morty (2013–present), the characters frequently return to the storyline in which they confront evil versions of themselves from other dimensions, while their home life features two versions of Morty’s mother who now live in the same house.
The multiverse brings new twists to comic book sagas on screen and in print, allowing reboots to be incorporated into the same narrative (as seen in Spider-Man: No Way Home, 2021), helping a film studio reuse, revitalize and promote its back catalog.
With moviegoers currently voting with their feet for this style of storytelling, we can expect many more multiverses to come. But don’t be surprised if the consequences of visiting these parallel worlds become increasingly grim.
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