You can't kill the multiverse now

The under-performance of the new Flash movie has already been attributed to a bunch of different things, from the star's off-screen foolishness to the general fucking weirdness of the movie, but there is no shortage of very serious people pontificating about how audiences are getting sick of multiverses, and that it's time for the concept to be rested.

Good luck with that, kids. Nerds have been trying to put that cork back in the bottle for decades.

There have been a tonne of different movies involving multiversal shenanigans in recent years. The superhero movies are getting all sorts of new toys out of them, and they're winning Oscars for this shit now.

It's fitting that it's the Flash that might have tipped the balance, because this was all Barry bloody Allen's fault in the first place, crossing worlds to team up with Jay Garrick. While that soon led to annual crossovers between Societies and Leagues, and Earths 3, B and S, it was all fairly restrained, as far as these things go.

And then the 1980s rolled along and DC, in all their charming naivety, thought things were getting too complicated for the average reader, and they tried to do away with the whole thing with the biggest Crisis ever.

Cramming it all into one earth lasted for a good three months, before DC was relying on pocket universes and vibrational dimensions to paper over the cracks, and the DC multiverse has now been rebooted multiple times, and is more prevalent than ever, and just as confusing as ever.

Marvel has had its own multiverse for decades, and has become increasingly blase about oversaturating its stories in alternative versions, while still pretending that the one single 616 universe still makes some kind of sense. 

Neither of these big comic companies show any sign of dialing back on the multiverse thing, and all those who are now sniffly predicting that mass audiences are getting tired of it too may have some point, but you can't get rid of that idea so easily. It'll stick around.

I expect there will be plenty of new movies coming about another world, another life, another you. The multiverse can't die, not when a doppelganger idea from the next universe over can always take over.