Michael Waldron, the author of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, admits that the multiverse plot line in the MCU movie baffled him at first. Last week, the long-awaited sequel to 2016’s Doctor Strange, directed by Sam Raimi, was released in theatres. Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff took a sinister turn in her quest to reunite with her two children, who were initially featured in last year’s WandaVision.
America Chavez (played by Xochitl Gomez), a little girl with the ability to punch through star portals that let her to travel through the multiverse, was also presented in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. With the multiverse fully established within the MCU thanks to last year’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, America Chavez’s new abilities hint at an exciting future for the multiverse in upcoming Marvel narrative. The multiverse saw Doctor Strange and America journey across a variety of other realms in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but multiversal travel, like many of these exciting new notions, comes with its own set of laws.
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Waldron highlights how certain sections of the multiverse were more challenging to write in a recent interview with Screen Rant, such as the film’s last act, in which Strange returns to the MCU’s Earth-616 to confront Olsen’s Scarlet Witch. Strange doesn’t have the ability to move through the multiverse, therefore the only way out of the reality he’s stuck in is to occupy the body of one of his variants, which Waldron described as a “genuine epiphany moment” when they came up with that plot line. See the complete quote from Waldron below.
With America’s powers now established, and the young hero having learnt to fully handle them during the film’s final scenes, many are anticipating the multiverse to play a larger role in the MCU’s next major endeavours. Even if it didn’t happen in this film, as the Illuminati appearances in Doctor Strange 2 demonstrated, this has the potential to radically alter the franchise’s ensemble of heroes. Waldron, who also functioned as the show’s lead writer, has spoken about the process of creating the multiverse on several occasions, including expressing regret for being so strict about the rules when writing Loki.
With the apparently limitless possibilities that the MCU’s multiverse can offer, it’s interesting to hear that Marvel’s writers occasionally struggle to figure out how to navigate it effectively. Finally, Waldron’s answer to Strange’s multiversal travel problem was a seamless addition to the plot, allowing Doctor Strange 2’s ending to unfold exactly as planned. As fans digest the thrilling events of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, it remains to be seen what kind of bizarre plot lines the multiverse will unleash next.