6 Multiverse Movies That’ll Make Your Head Spin
My favorite movies typically involve some element of magic, sci-fi, fantasy or impossibility. A large number of them mess with the space-time continuum—I’m a sucker for anything having to do with time travel, for example.
But lately a new subgenre has been capturing my imagination more and more: multiverse movies. These 6 in particular are guaranteed to blow your mind.
Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness – To the MCU’s Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), skipping across the multiverse is a challenge he wants to master. He gets a chance when the young America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) crosses his path and reveals she world-jumps every time she loses her cool. Can Strange help her harness her power, or will the mad-with-grief Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) get to Chavez first? Read my full review for more.
Everything Everywhere All At Once – This is the must-see movie of 2022! Michelle Yeoh stars as a world-weary laundromat owner whose life is suddenly turned upside-down when an alternate version of her husband (Ke Huy Quan) informs her that she must summon the experiences of her other multiverse lives in order to save the world as we know it. It’s creative, it’s silly, it’s funny, it’s heartbreaking, and it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before.
Spider-Man: No Way Home – While I think EEAAO (above) is the best multiverse movie in recent memory, No Way Home is definitely the most fun. I had a smile on my face the entire time, and absolutely loved the joy ride that was multiple Spider-Men and Spider-Man villains from across space-time tussling around together.
Run Lola Run – This is the first multiverse movie I remember seeing, and I even remember where I was when I saw it: Chicago’s Music Box Theatre, when it premiered in 1998. It felt like someone had shot me up with adrenaline as I watched Lola (Franka Potente) run, run, run across Berlin again and again in an attempt to secure a huge amount of cash so that mobsters won’t kill her boyfriend. With each attempt, she seems to remember something from her past lives that she carries forward. It’ll leave you breathless.
Another Earth – Brit Marling and William Mapother star as an astronomy student and music professor brought together by tragedy during a week where everyone on the planet learns that there is another Earth. Yep, another Earth just like ours is up there and has suddenly come close enough to travel to—and it’s home to a bunch of other us-es. While this might not be a multiverse movie in the strictest sense, I’m counting it as one because its core premise is about Marling and Mapother’s characters yearning to know if the other-thems made different life choices that did NOT lead to the tragedy. And man oh man, is its final scene is amazing.
Mr. Nobody – And finally we have Jared Leto in this unconventional film that’s set in a time when humans are no longer fully mortal. Except for Leto’s character, who is 118 and about to die. He tells his life story from three perspectives—when he was 9, 15 and 34 years old—and explores what might have happened if he made different choices. While Mr. Nobody made lots of critics’ Top 10 lists when it came out in 2010, it wasn’t until recently that a wider audience found it, and now it’s something of a cult favorite. Don’t miss your chance to find out why!