Spider-Man: No Way Home—the most hyped Marvel movie since Avengers: Endgame—drops on Friday, Dec. 17. The early buzz has been universally positive. Critics are praising lead actor Tom Holland for his portrayal of Peter Parker. They are also praising Sony and Marvel Studios for doing what once seemed impossible: uniting all three Spider-Man movie franchises under a single title. It’s a two-and-a-half-hour movie that’s been germinating for over two decades.
According to the trailers and preview footage, Spider-Man: No Way Home embraces the concept of a Multiverse. Dr. Strange botches a spell intended to help Peter, and he inadvertently opens an interdimensional pathway, through which different universes can contact and interact with one another. This is a mistake that will reverberate for years to come; Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the follow-up to this film, hits theaters in May.
But this is not a sudden plot twist; Marvel Studios has been building and foreshadowing the concept of a Multiverse for years. Here’s everything you need to know about the MCU Multiverse—what it is, how it started, and where it goes from here.
What is a Multiverse?
The reason a theory this insane exists and is a topic of serious discussion amongst theoretical physicists is because on a subatomic level, matter behaves in ways that are odd and counterintuitive:
“Before you look at an object, whether it’s an electron, or an atom or whatever, it’s not in any definite location,” says theoretical physicist Sean Carroll in an interview with NBC. “It might be more likely that you observe it in one place or another, but it’s not actually located at any particular place.”
The “many worlds” theory sprung from an attempt to explain this phenomenon—that particles seem to exist in multiple places and forms until they are measured. As crazy as it sounds, this is an explanation that does not create even more paradoxes and problems.