Now that Marvel Cinematic Universe fans know their way around the multiverse a little better thanks to the events of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, certain aspects of that movie are enough to make a reappraisal of the franchise’s previous installment, Spider-Man: No Way Home.
The Reddit user u/BooneBanterra pointed out on the r/MarvelStudios subreddit that it seems like the climax of No Way Home involved multiple universes almost colliding. Such a phenomenon was dubbed an “incursion” in a movie that came out several months later, Multiverse of Madness. So why did it seem like Benedict Cumberbatch’s Dr. Stephen Strange has no idea about the nature of incursions in Multiverse of Madness?
“So did Strange already cause an Incursion in Spider-Man: No Way Home? Wasn’t an incursion pretty much the plot of that movie? How does he not know this already in MOM?”
One Marvel fan got in a debate with the original poster, saying that the climax in No Way Home wasn’t necessarily an incursion, but “simply different portals opening up.”
“But even if it was an Incursion, why would Strange know the name of it?” the Reddit user went on to say.
Another Twitter user posited that the event from No Way Home was an incursion on account of Michale Keaton’s Adrian Toomes, AKA Vulture, from the MCU getting stuck in the universe where Morbius takes place (AKA Sony’s Spider-Man Universe).
A critical unpacking of the Morbius universe by another Marvel fan shows just how nonsensical it is, since it seemed to imply Vulture was originally from the SSU, and got transported to the MCU over a decade prior due to having a grown, teenage child.
“You’ve thought about it more than the writers ever did,” another Reddit user wrote.
One reason for all the apparently-anomalous loose ends in this particular era of Marvel movies is the fact that Multiverse of Madness was originally supposed to come out before No Way Home, as We Got This Covered previously reported. Therefore, there’s little doubt that each movie probably went through rewrites and possibly even reshoots to make the continuity more consistent in each movie. Who knows, maybe the original draft for No Way Home utilized the full gamut of the multiverse vocabulary we later learned in the Doctor Strange sequel.