Fascinated by the multiverse and alternate realities? Here’s a handy guide to some good stuff
Loved “Everything everywhere all at once?” Can’t get enough of “The Flash” and “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” this month? Then this list is for you. We’ve put together a non-exhaustive collection of fiction about alternate universes and multiverses – from movies to TV to comics to books. It’s a great starter pack if your media taste leads you to wonder: What if?
MOVIES:
— “It’s a Great Life” (1946): In this Christmas classic, family man George Bailey grows increasingly frustrated as opportunities pass him by. his life is important.
— “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” (2022): After years of hints and splinters, including an emerging storyline in “Spider-Man: No Way Home” (2021), Marvel goes full multiverse in this exploration of how realities can collide and bleed into each other.
— “Sliding doors” (1998): Gwyneth Paltrow misses a train – and does not. The two splinter realities unfold very differently, producing versions of her character that must be reconciled.
— “Yesterday” (2019): Jack Malik, aspiring musician, finds himself in an almost identical universe where no one has ever heard of the Beatles (or Coca-Cola). He starts singing the songs as if he wrote them. Hijinks and big feelings follow.
— “The Butterfly Effect” (2004): Ashton Kutcher plays a college student who discovers he can revise his past and change things, and each time he does, a different reality is born.
— “The Family Man” (2000): After meeting at a convenience store, arrogant Manhattan financier Jack Campbell wakes up to a very different – and less affluent – life in the New Jersey suburbs to find himself married to and parenting has with his old girlfriend, from whom he had run away years ago. As he navigates his new life and the choices he may or may not have made to get there, a more complex picture emerges.
And for the kids…
— “Shrek Forever After” (2010): Shrek finds himself in an alternate, dark reality where he never met Fiona.
TV:
— “Star Trek” (1967 onward): A “mirror universe” reveals a darker, more evil version of the show’s United Federation of Planets – the Terran Empire, punctuated by brutality and murder. This universe was revisited in multiple ‘Trek’ sequels throughout the 1990s and 2010s.
— “Russian doll” (2019-present): In season one, Nadia keeps dying at a party and keeps waking up in slightly different universes, though each awakening always ends with her death.
— “Undone” (2019-2022): In this striking hybrid of live action and animation, a young woman’s relationship with her long-dead father takes an unexpected turn after a car accident when he appears in a vision and tells her that other realities exist possible — including one where he lived and was around for her upbringing.
— “Fringe” (2008-2013): Sci-fi meets family drama meets law enforcement procedural as a father raids a parallel universe to rescue – and steal – another version of his son and deal with the world-changing consequences.
— “The Man in the High Castle” (2015-2019): It’s the 1960s, the Nazis and Japan won World War II, and the world is playing out very differently – in sometimes unexpected ways.
– “For All Mankind” (2019-present): The Soviets won the space race and reached the moon first. This is how history played out after that.
COMICS:
— “Flashpoint” (2011): The DC Comics series that informed movie “The Flash”, it deals with the damage done by the protagonist, Barry Allen, when he goes back in time to save his mother.
– “What if?” (From the 1970s): This speculative series, which began in the comics and moved to streaming TV in 2021, takes different angles of Marvel’s “main” universe and remixes events and characters.
— “House of M” (2005): The Scarlet Witch reboots reality and changes the lives of some of Marvel’s top heroes in fundamental and chaotic ways, including Spider-Man, Doctor Strange and Captain America. This series was one of the ingredients of the 2020 Marvel TV show ‘WandaVision’.
BOOKS:
— “The Mirage” (2013): This novel by Matt Ruff, author of “Lovecraft Country,” depicts a through-the-glass world in which American Christian fundamentalists were the perpetrators of 9/11, who destroyed the Twin Towers in attacked Baghdad, located in the United Arab States. Characters include Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden remixes.
— “Einstein’s Dreams” (1992): Dreamlike fiction by Alan Lightman describing explorations of various permutations of time and alternate universes that Albert Einstein may have dreamed up when he came up with the theory of relativity in 1905.
– “The Space Between Worlds” (2020): A novel by Micaiah Johnson that depicts a time when travel across the multiverse has become commonplace – causing very obvious security concerns for some of those who travel.
