All Our Favorite Multiverses, Ranked

Multiverses aren’t a new thing by any stretch. DC Comics has been messing around with the multiverse since the early 1960s. Stephen King has single-handedly created a multiverse in his books that spawns the Dark Tower series, IT, the Talisman, and more. TV shows like Fringe and Sliders played with parallel universes for years.

Not all multiverses are created equal, though. They’re often trying to do different things for different reasons. The Marvel Cinematic Universe was just that–a universe–until Spider-Man: No Way Home. No Way Home united twenty years of Spider-Man movies, bringing together three Peter Parkers and their nemeses from the three Spider-Man movie series, putting Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus in the same room as Jamie Foxx’s Electro. Everything Everywhere All at Once, meanwhile, couldn’t care less about legacy or hooking you in for future sequels–it just has a lot to say about what could’ve been and what is.

The different multiverses can be mostly lumped into a few broad categories.

• The Everything Is Canon multiverse is for the fans and writers. Your favorite Batman is still there regardless of the current take on the character, and you can even make them interact with each other if need be!
• The Planet of Hats multiverse is for episodic TV series–a way to explore lots of concepts and ideas for a short period of time. The Planet of Hats trope refers to those sci-fi worlds where every inhabitant has a unifying trait, such as a planet of amazons, a planet stuck in the 1930s gangster era, or a planet where everyone is part of the same war culture without exception.
• The Self-Contained multiverse is typically used just within the bounds of that story, and isn’t meant to connect to anything else. These stories are concerned primarily with exploring their main characters, and not very worried about getting into the rules of multiversality.
• The FOMO multiverse really wants you to come back for the next installment. It will tell you at the end of one installment what might happen in the next one, and it’s all for the sake of getting its hooks into you so hard that you can’t bear to turn away (right until you get too exhausted to continue).

Different properties can bleed between multiverse types, starting as one and becoming another, but typically they fit pretty neatly into these categories for the most part. The categories don’t inherently decide how we rank the different multiverses, but some offer more opportunities than others.

With that in mind, here’s our ranking for all the pop culture multiverses we could come up with