By Ryan Epps Published Jun 26, 2026, 7:27 PM EDT What to Watch Multiverse movies don't have to be bad
Disney's $1.5 billion sci-fi epic is already a #1 worldwide streaming hit after just 1 day Ahead of Zach Cregger's Resident Evil, breakout horror hit Barbarian is finally getting a physical release Absolute Batman is getting his own TV show The $25 million sci-fi movie that puts Marvel to shame is about to leave Netflix Image: A24 Everything Everywhere All at Once Sign in to your Polygon.com account The multiverse used to feel limitless. There was seemingly infinite magic waiting to be mined from the far-out concept of infinite branching, parallel realities that could be used by storytellers to reinvent beloved narratives , give aging heroes one last curtain call after years away, or simply push visual effects into exciting new territory . The multiverse felt boundless — up until Hollywood abused it so heavily that infinite possibilities somehow became predictable.
Despite this, Marvel is still betting hundreds of millions of dollars and staking the future of its cinematic universe on this very concept. Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars are poised to close the book on the franchise's multiverse saga, but as anticipation builds, I can't help thinking one Oscar-winning indie from 2022 already perfected the idea on a budget of roughly $20 million.
Image: Allyson Riggs/A24/Everett Collection Everything Everywhere All at Once , which makes the jump from HBO Max to Tubi at the end of June, succeeds where most multiverse movies fail for one simple reason: the multiverse is never the point. Directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (collectively known as “The Daniels”) use this vast array of infinite realities to explore a single family's trauma in clever ways. For The Daniels, the multiverse wasn’t a gimmick, but a gateway to real-world, human feelings like regret, grief, and nihilism.
“I don’t care about multiverse movies,” Kwan said in an interview with Fast Company . “Once the multiverse is introduced, nothing matters — there is no choice, and a character’s nothing without his choices.”
When struggling laundromat owner Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) discovers she can access the memories and abilities of alternate versions of herself, she's thrust into a multiversal conflict that could determine the fate of every reality. But while this may sound like the setup to the latest superhero blockbuster, Everything Everywhere All at Once pivots in a million unexpected directions to tell the weirdest and most personal story the multiverse genre has ever seen.
It's the kind of story Marvel rarely allows itself to tell because its stakes are ultimately personal rather than cosmic. In Everything Everywhere All at Once, every bizarre reality — from hot dog fingers to a universe where two sentient rocks silently overlook a canyon — exists because it reveals something interesting about its characters. Even the movie's most ridiculous jokes reinforce the emotional core of the film. The absurdity isn't there to distract from the story; it is the story.
Photo: Allyson Riggs/A24 The contrast in directorial vision is staggering. Marvel treats the multiverse as an intellectual property sandbox primarily used to cameo-bait audiences and tease the next decade of content. Every universe feels like another franchise waiting to be explored, constructed using massive CGI pipelines and yielding generic green-screen voids. Too often, thos...