Putting aside the recent scandals surrounding co-creator and voice actor Justin Roiland (no easy feat, admittedly), we can surely all agree that Adult Swim's Rick and Morty is a great TV series. Irreverent, original, and downright hilarious, the show has broken new ground in the realm of mature animated storytelling in a similar manner to South Park once upon a time.
While the title characters often head into outer space on various misadventures, the Multiverse is a concept that's been key since the beginning. There's a whole Citadel of alternate reality Ricks, for example, and the duo have casually hopped between universes for the sake of a punchline on multiple occasions. One episode even saw them destroy their planet, find another Earth that's almost identical, kill and bury their respective doppelgangers, and then take their place as if nothing happened. It's a moment which has since been referenced, but Rick and Morty is set in a largely consequence-free world, a necessity of episodic television and a series that, once it concludes, will live on as reruns from now until the end of time.
In recent years, Marvel Studios has hired a number of Rick and Morty writers to work on the MCU, specifically for stories key to the Multiverse Saga.
After writing Loki, Michael Waldron was tapped to pen Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and is currently hard at work on Avengers: Secret Wars. Jeff Loveness, meanwhile, kicked things off with Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania and has since been hired to write Avengers: The Kang Dynasty.
Now, we're not going to underestimate or play down the talent of either writer. However, this increasingly complicated and confusing Saga of storytelling is in the hands of two comedy writers whose contributions to the MCU have been hit-and-miss at best. Loki, while excellent, never really bothered to properly explain the Multiverse and left fans with a lot of questions. The Doctor Strange sequel was fine, but underwhelmed fans, and had little to no connective tissue with Loki. As for Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, it's close to being the worst-reviewed MCU movie ever.
Both Waldron and Loveness are used to working as part of a writers room on a chaotic series where the co-creator paraded an adult film star through the office, so they can probably handle Marvel Studios' unique approach to storytelling. However, whether they're qualified enough for the job is up for debate, and handing them an Avengers movie each could prove to be a costly mistake on Marvel Studios' part. By the time Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus got to work on Infinity War and Endgame, they'd cut their teeth on the Captain America franchise, with Civil War essentially Avengers 2.5, anyway.
It feels like Marvel Studios is relying too heavily on Waldron and Loveness' past experience with Multiversal storytelling to shape this Multiverse Saga and, so far, it's not going well. There's still time to answer many of the questions fans have, but with poorly defined rules, storytelling that's alienating critics and non-hardcore fans, and hit-and-miss projects from both writers, now might be a good time to rethink things and go back to the drawing board.
There's bound to be some sort of grand plan that ties everything together, but Steve Rogers spent decades in an alternate timeline with Peggy Carter, only for Loki to tell us, "Eh, that was supposed to happen so it's okay." That flies in the face of what we learned in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and suggests the Multiverse's rules are both being made up on the fly and changed to suit each story. It's a concept that lessens the stakes as it is (if there are literally countless Kang Variants, why do any of these Kangs actually matter?), but the approach we've seen thus far does little to inspire confidence and it's telling that Waldron and Loveness are at the heart of that.
The MCU isn't Rick and Morty, and the unconventional, throwaway approach to the Multiverse that's served that show just fine isn't working here. Putting Kang after Kang on screen and basically explaining it as "LOL, Variants from the Multiverse!" isn't going to fly the same way it does when Rick Sanchez casually blasts through his alternate selves. Now, we're sure many of you will feel like we're jumping the gun, but reliable sources suggest only Loki season 2 will be directly Multiverse-related before Avengers: The Kang Dynasty arrives. Deadpool 3 too, of course, but again, that's a comedic movie and one we find it hard to believe will pit the Merc with the Mouth and Wolverine against Kang. Loki certainly stands a chance of explaining things, but season 2's Head Writer? Rick and Morty scribe Eric Martin.
Again, Rick and Morty is a fantastic series and worthy of the acclaim it receives. The writers we've mentioned are all hugely talented individuals we're excited to see in the MCU. As we head into Phase 5, however, it's clear that the show's writers aren't entirely adept at telling stories in the MCU, and if this Saga is relying solely on them to bring all these muddled and poorly defined ideas together for The Kang Dynasty and Secret Wars (amid disappointing non-Multiverse-related movies like Eternals and Thor: Love and Thunder), Marvel Studios may be in trouble.