Marvel Studios is nothing but patient when it comes to slowly unveiling its plans for the MCU. After spending half a decade teasing the coming of Thanos, and several more fully realizing the Mad Titan and his Infinity War/Endgame story, they are now doing it all over again with the multiverse and several possible Big Bads of the future. With alternate realities and dimensions being brought into the MCU via Doctor Strange in 2016, the possibility of multiple parallel timelines was explained further by the Sorcerer Supreme in Avengers Endgame. From the start, Phase 4 of the MCU was destined to explore this in more depth and with Loki having given the multiverse its first big push forward, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness producer Richie Palmer recently discussed how the events of Loki impacted on the Doctor Strange sequel.

MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY

So far in Phase 4, WandaVision included a subtle look at alternative realities, Loki saw the Sacred Timeline being disrupted and the multiverse taking over, animated series What If…? delved into the multiverse and other possible Marvel Universes, before Spider-Man: No Way Home saw Stephen Strange tampering with the multiverse and allowing variants to enter the MCU. From the trailers, we already know that Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is now about to dive deeper into the multiverse than any other Marvel release, and it promises to be a rollercoaster ride.

In Disney’s D23 Magazine, via The Direct, producer Palmer detailed the way Loki introduced the idea of variants and other mirrored timelines, meaning that the Doctor Strange sequel avoids having to laboriously explain the concept again. With the movie being written by Loki scribe Michael Waldron, there seems to be no going back after this entry in the continuing Marvel story. Palmer said:

“It was really exciting. We found that we didn’t need to spend a lot of time recapping the rules; we felt the audience would get a lot of that by now. With Michael, we could jump into telling a good story within what’s already been established. Michael’s strength is the character stuff. As you saw in Loki, all the best moments involved the characters against the backdrop of those alternate timelines. It’s kind of like that in our movie, too. Michael’s script brought a lot of heart to sci-fi concepts such as the Multiverse.”

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness Could Finally Answer The Question: Who Broke The Multiverse?

     Joe Quesada/Marvel Studios

Ever since Marvel first hinted that the multiverse would be playing a part in the future of the franchise, fans have been theorizing over exactly how it would come about and what it would mean for the MCU’s future. While Loki promised surprises, secrets and hints about the multiverse, in the end the expectation of audiences were a little beyond what actually ended up occurring. However, it did seem like Loki and his variant Sylvie had broken open the multiverse and were solely responsible for the chaos to follow.

However, the post credit scene of Venom: Let There Be Carnage, which saw Tom Hardy’s symbiote finding himself being transported into the MCU, suggested that Loki was perhaps not the cause of the multiverse disturbance. In Spider-Man: No Way Home, it became clear that this anomaly was caused by Strange’s miscast spell that was meant to allow the world to forget Peter Parker is Spider-Man. However, by the end of the movie the world was, mostly, back to how it was at the beginning of the movie, meaning that there was still no definitive reason for the multiverse chaos that Marvel promised is coming.

Now it looks like, once again, we have a new contender to be the reason the multiverse leaks into the MCU in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. But what it the exact reason? While the trailers have so far suggested that the Spider-Man: No Way Home spell is what instigates the events of the Doctor Strange’s latest adventure, it is more likely that there is more to be revealed when the movie arrives in May that will actually answer all of our multiverse questions once and for all.