Another Hot Take: Multiverses Are Lazy and Hackish

You, being the writer of a story, have total control over what happens in the story, when it happens, and how it happens. And yet, in an ungodly amount of media I see today (not just movies) these writers manage to write themselves into corners, and create plotholes all on their own. It's like God creating the rock too heavy for him to lift. Why'd you do that? So what do they do? Throw in some contrived time-travel/alternate dimension mumbo jumbo to try and undo it or cover it up. "Hey, isn't that character dead?" "Uh...no...he uh...it happened in a different timeline! Yeah, that's it!" Come on, now. How dumb do you think your audience is? You wrote yourself into a corner, and are now desperately trying to write your way out of it. I just think it's embarrassing. Just don't write yourself into a corner in the first place. Pay attention to detail and continuity, etc. I'm certain there are some exceptions to the rule. But in general I think multiverses and time travel are often just lazy plot devices used by hackish artists trying to escape a situation of their own making.

Edit: Also worth noting situations where there's no need at all for the multiverse to exist. "Yeah, this movie is also in the same multiverse as that other one, they just didn't crossover." So why mention it at all? You could just say it's a different movie, and that it doesn't have to fit into any others. It's like me saying that James Bond and Twin Peaks take place in the same universe, and it just so happens that the two never cross paths.

Edit 2: It also diminishes the effect of certain happenings withing a movie. I, somehow, was made to watch some Marvel movie involving Spiderman. God knows I wouldn't be found dead watching a Marvel movie voluntarily so a girlfriend must have dragged me to it, or a friend's little sibling wanted to see it. In any case, by that point I knew what to expect from the people making this schlock. I think at some point someone died, and I just remember shrugging and thinking, "don't worry, he'll be fine." There are no longer consequences because people can just keep going back and rewriting events.

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Eh. Time travel and multiverses are particularly lazy. It's the addition of a huge plot device solely to correct the failings of the maker. It's smashing the glass jar to build the model ship that's inside and then creating a new glass jar around the model ship.

And yet the Deus Ex Machina is still dragged onto the stage. Death is denied. Fate is reversed. Our heroes are resurrected (i.e., our toys are brought back out of the toybox).

We created literature to correct for the failings of the real world (which is stuffy, incorrigible, and unrelenting with all the death and taxes and so on). Literature is our little rebellion against the world as it is written, so is it any wonder that the rebellion renews when we find ourselves painted in a corner? Like Lola, in Run Lola, Run, we say "No!" and insist on a redo.

It is not the use of the thing that chafes, but the inartful use. Lie to me, but make me believe it, damn you!

Well I guess the problem is that ultimately I find the abrupt existence of time travel/multiverses less plausible than some overworked, underslept intern needing to quickly cook up an explanation as to how the character we killed five years ago in part one is suddenly alive and kicking in part 3.

This is a problem with any fantastical universe.

Science fiction offers the vices of time travel and multiverses and simulated realities and clones

Magical universes offer the vices of necromancy, rebirth, and other spells.

It is only the humble drama which seems to play by the rules, but even here we have amnesiacs, twins, hallucinations, flashbacks, and so on.

Find me a genre and I wager we will find the same cheats.

What was so compelling about Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead was, in large part, that when people died they generally stayed dead. The latter, however, proved to be a bit too brutal for most viewers when they finally killed off Glenn forealsies.

Again, its not that we mind the f**ckery so much as we don't want to see it coming. And I think what the two of us find so disappointing about a time travel movie or multiverse movie is the instant realization that "Oh, so there are really no stakes in this one..." The premise IS the naked Deus Ex Machina. It's worse than bad writing. It's bad premising.

Movies that are adaptations of previously existing material will frequently use the same stories and concepts that were used in that source material.

This is what Hollywood has been doing for over 100 years now.

I'll say they can be lazy, for sure. Which is kind of another way of saying they can be really good when handled deftly. But that's difficult and, therefore, not especially common.

Managing scope is definitely a serious problem for any film and, in particular, any film series/franchise/cinematic universe. The same way it was for the comic books inspiring most of what we're talking about.

The fact that the comics have been at it longer also means that there's a considerable amount of data on what has worked with readers and what hasn't.

Not that something that works in print will invariably work in a movie, but at least there's some lessons I'm sure they must have learned over the years on what use of this type of technique tends to play better...

Probably, but I think it's all just managing a decline. Stories require change, arcs, resolution. Good stories are fundamentally incompatible with longevity on this scale, so there's a degree to which any cinematic universe or long-running franchise is trying to square a circle. Hence all the reboots.

I find that storytelling tends to be somewhat cyclical. The first Nosferatu movie came out 102 years ago, and audiences are flocking to the latest version of it right now. (There have also been any number of Dracula-related movies between 1922 and 2024)

So maybe good stories are stories that can be told time and time again?

I think that's a different use of the word "story." There is not, for example, a universal "Batman story" that encompasses all tellings of it. There is a character of Batman. There are common elements and tropes, but ultimately they're only as good as a specific story, a specific rendition. I don't get joy or delight from just musing on the abstract concept of Batman, I get joy or delight from seeing a particularly good telling of it.

So I'd say what you're talking about is material, rather than story. The difference between saying "this is a beautiful dress" and "this is a lovely material from which you can hopefully make a beautiful dress."

It's more like the big studios/Hollywood are lazy, because movie consumers want extra big servings of the same old soft drink and the studios churn out product, not films. There are exceptions of course, but all the mega movie companies that have consumed the smaller ones have helped create jumbo-dumbo flicks.

The example of a story that I gave which can be told time and time again was Nosferatu. And, indeed, the 3 feature films that have been made with that name all share the same story, and the same characters (albeit some of them have different names).

The events happen to be pretty much the same in all 3 movies: the husband goes out to meet with the Nosferatu character, leaving the wife behind, etc etc etc.

Batman isn't really a single story - there's an origin story, sure, but then after that there have been multiple writers in the comics doing a lot of different Batman stories. I'm not even sure how they justify that he never ages. Or sometimes he's been shown as an old man (Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns).

And so you have... many basic stories that people respond to and come back to again and again. The underdog who overcomes the odds. The young kid who faces adversity and becomes a grown-up. The villain who gets their just punishment. The basic outline of the story can be pretty much the same, and you just change some of the details.

What does this have to do with the multiverse thing? I think at some level, the writers are acknowledging something creative types already know - when a basic type of story is successful, audiences are fundamentally left hoping to recreate the experience... as the adage goes, to show them something that is "the same, but different".

And it's been shown that when it's done right, people will respond. Deadpool & Wolverine became the biggest R-rated movie ever made - and people didn't seem to mind that Wolverine had "died" in a prior movie. ("Hey kids, this is a variant of Wolverine - the one that you saw die, really did die. This one here is just a different one!")

That movie worked because it used the "multiverse" as just a silly excuse to give people more of something they still wanted.

When audiences vote with their wallets, familiarity tends to win almost every time. Practically every one of the top 10 movies this year will have been a sequel/reboot or a reinvention of an existing IP.

Just like a vampire never dies unless you stake them through the heart, a lot of the material Hollywood works with also kind of never dies, it just keeps transforming.

The "multiverse" concept simply accepts that universal truth and runs with it. Because it's a means to giving the audiences what they want most - and a lot of the time, it will be stuff they are already familiar with.

That's just my 2 cents, I'm sure there are other equally valid takes.

You say time and time again, but that's what, three times in a century? I picked Batman as an example because it's directly applicable to the world of reboots and cinematic universes, which is what the OP is talking about. The frequency is the important part, because that's what's necessitating the multiverse stuff.

Those details essentially are the story. What you're describing are tropes. Themes. They are the "material" I was referring to. Nobody reads their child a bedtime story and just says "an underdog overcomes the odds. Good night."

You know where we see that same theme? All of the Air Bud movies. Look at all the classic tropes those movies hit: underdogs (get it?), fish-out-of-water, etc. It contains lots of classic themes, the same themes as some of the greatest and most beloved stories of all-time. But as art...it's garbage, right? Because anyone can pick a theme, anyone can pick a type of story. That's not the hard part, and therefore not the valuable part. And why does the valuable/hard part matter? Because whether a thing is predictable and easy, or creative and difficult, is literally the thing you ask yourself when determining what is "hacky," per the OP's claim.

In fact, I think you're ultimately making that argument for them, when you talk about themes that recur throughout storytelling history. That makes them more susceptible to creative laziness, not less. Doing something everybody else has already done is the literal definition of "hacky."

But there's a difference between, "yeah, we know our movie doesn't make any sense in the context of existing material, just roll with it" and, "uh...multiverses or something, man." It's, as Judge Judy would say, peeing down someone's back and telling them it's raining. There's a sort of dishonesty to it.

It's not that it doesn't make sense, but that there are no stakes.

Not making sense is a quite forgivable sin. Scene continuity flaws don't make sense. Bizarre character motivations don't make sense. Anachronisms don't make sense. But when stuff happens, at least we know it happened.

With a multiverse or time-travel, however, nothing that happens has to "stick." Everything can be undone. You can destroy a whole universe and just escape into an adjacent universe (e.g., LEXX). You can kill any character you please and pluck another one from another world (there's always another Buzz Lightyear in another toybox). Nothing matters, because nothing has to stick.

You don't have to earn anything in a multiverse or timetravel film, save for offer technobabble and have a fight scene to secure and capture the magic eraser MacGuffin.

These are inherently weak premises.

Eh. I think it was actually a very cool idea, especially as a big Science Nerd myself, until it got overdone. I don't think the whole baby should be thrown out with the bathwater though.

We shouldn't do the false equivalency thing either, however. These are weak premises which tend to make for weaker stories. They can be done acceptably, but frequently they are not.

Not all tropes are created equal. Not all plot devices are created equal. "World Erasers" are the most ridiculous devices writers have contrived.

World Erasers should be treated in the same way we treat an informal fallacy, which is to say that we should not reject them out of hand (find me just about any informal fallacy and I will find you an acceptable use case), but rather that they should be regarded with suspicion (as inherently weaker forms that often "go wrong").

A generalized contempt is deserved.

I think the best multiversal stories are actually surprisingly consistent to their own logic, but YMMV