Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse has surpassed the entire box office run of 2018’s, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in just a short couple of weeks. The comic book sequel’s global earnings have surpassed $390 million dollars and is still on the upswing. That’s strange, because every time I get on the webs I keep seeing or hearing about the modern era of superhero fatigue and the flavor of the month is the Multiverse. Not to say that bad, creatively bankrupt multiverse stories can’t be written — and badly written crap is a chore to read or watch no matter what it’s trying to say. But “multiverses are stupid and I hate them!” is kind of an extreme reaction, and definitely not a consensus view among people watching comic book movies (or other films like the award winning EEAAO), good or bad. There are potential storytelling issues with multiverse movies, but the idea that they’re box office poison is demonstrably untrue at this point.
Unlike other media, comic books are a medium that is sometimes driven not by story, but by art. A whole continuity can be created because some artist got sick of drawing the same Batman model for the 2000th time and put him in a 1950s space suit instead, and that picture was so damned cool that it inspired others to riff on it and fill out enough details for a 24-page punch-‘em-up that a lot of Batman fans will buy because look at that cool picture, and some will buy because they need to know the antecedents of Space Captain Bruce Batman, Defender of Gotham-7. If a suitably inspired writer gets hold of it, sky’s the limit. My point being that fretting about whether this is all going to make sense and say something profound seems a little bit silly: comics don’t always have to do that, and neither do Cinematic Universes based on comics, if you ask me.
Maybe they do say something profound. Because I have never understood this idea that the death of Tony Stark or Ben Parker or Nora Allen somehow “doesn’t matter” if there’s another one out there in some other universe. Do you love your grandpa because he was the ONE AND ONLY your grandpa in all of creation, or do you love him because you’ve spent your life with him and built a relationship of shared experiences and affection? And when he dies, hasn’t something irreplaceable been lost, regardless of the existence of any number of “equal and original” counterparts elsewhere?
The multiverse forces us to confront the idea that each of us is equal and irreplaceable, no matter what we look like or how we choose to live. Into the Spider-Verse in particular makes this point fantastically well, using different styles of animation to immerse us completely in strange worlds that nevertheless all contain villains of great menace and heroes that rise up to challenge them. And the multiverse challenges us to understand that whether the hero looks like a cartoon pig, an Afro-Latino kid from Brooklyn, or a 2-door sedan named Peter Parkedcar doesn’t matter — what matters is that they protect the helpless and make great sacrifices in service of others. Heroism can be found anywhere. A skinny teenager. A pteranodon body-swapped into a T-Rex. Maybe even you (in any universe.)