The Multiverse: Where Is It Taking the Movies?
The 2023 Academy Awards saw historic firsts in many important categories. But another breakthrough that may be eluding the minds of moviegoers is the fact that this year’s Best Picture winner, Everything Everywhere All at Once (EEAAO), is a sci-fi flick. Not only is it a sci-fi movie, but one that concerns the multiverse: a subgenre of sci-fi that has been trending over the past decade. Never before has a science fiction film been so dominating at the Oscars, let alone one about the multiverse. By the end of the night, EEAAO had won seven awards out of the eleven nominations it received.
The last sci-fi film to even come close to this level of hardware was Star Wars in 1977, which netted ten nominations and seven wins. But, like all other science fiction movies nominated before EEAAO, Star Wars failed to claim Best Picture. EEAAO’s win of the Academy’s grandest prize has cemented the legitimacy of zany multiverse films, and being that it’s a non-superhero franchise film, it has marked a jump in this niche genre toward award-winning caliber content of a high degree. EEAAO is currently projected to be the most awarded film of all time.
So, you might be asking yourself, what is the multiverse? Well, it’s a hypothetical assembly of multiple universes that co-exist concurrently in space and time. If you’ve heard of parallel universes, then you know of the multiverse. The first recorded use of the cosmological theory in fiction dates back only as far as the 1960s, the golden era of comic books, where it was introduced in an issue of DC’s superhero Flash. Though, Star Trek fans, or Trekkies, would argue that their show popularized it for television in the same decade. If that’s the case, no one seemed to catch on to it because the time travel subgenre went on to rule sci-fi throughout the latter half of the 20th century instead. Box office conquering franchises like Back to the Future and The Terminator and popular television shows such as Doctor Who and Quantum Leap made time travel an industry staple. It’s only now, after entering the new millennium, that the multiverse has become so ubiquitous throughout popular media.
The multiverse boom occurred in unison with the rise of the internet age, which increased the reach of popular science’s most exciting theories, like the Big Bang, Black Holes, Quantum Mechanics, and, yes, the multiverse as well. Public intellectuals like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Michio Kaku, both big proponents of the multiverse theory, were able to educate science hobbyists on theoretical physics through the accessibility of podcasts and YouTube. Throughout the 2000s and into the 2010s, the public’s interest in the idea of a multiverse grew. And in 2013, upon the premiere of the incredibly successful Adult Swim show Rick and Morty, which uses the multiverse as a plot in nearly every episode, that interest skyrocketed. After the triumph of Rick and Morty, the multiverse seemed to be everywhere in popular media.
In 2018, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was released to great critical and audience acclaim, showing just how harmoniously the multiverse subgenre works with comic book storytelling. Soon after, the Marvel Cinematic Universe utilized the multiverse as a plot device in all of their subsequent films, as seen most recently, and not so subtly, in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. And now, with the worldwide praise of EEAAO, the multiverse has entered the hearts of all moviegoers, from low-brow to high-brow, thanks to the wise bet made by indie-art production studio A24.
The future for the multiverse is indeed bright. EEAAO has made an indelible impact on the filmmakers of tomorrow, as well as filmmakers of today. Steven Spielberg has become a notable fan of the directing team The Daniels, whose creative force is behind EEAAO. At a recent press conference, the legendary filmmaker noted, “I learn, actually, more from young filmmakers today […] The Daniels, such amazing genius work on Everything Everywhere All at Once.” If this is any indication of how the filmmaking community views the multiverse subgenre, it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.