Why Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’s villain is pissed at the MCU
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’s new trailer is beautiful, and it’s also kicked a very nerdy hornets’ nest. How? Miguel O’Hara, the Spider-Man of 2099, tosses off a casual line about how annoying Doctor Strange and “the little nerd back on Earth-199999” were. He’s talking about Tom Holland’s Spider-Man in Spider-Man: No Way Home.
And yeah, if we were trying to safeguard the multiverse, we’d be pretty mad at Peter Parker and Stephen Strange for mucking it up for two whole movies. But by referring to the MCU’s setting as “Earth-199999,” Miguel has thrown down a gauntlet of technically epic proportions. Because the MCU would like you to think it doesn’t take place on Earth-199999, and reader, we must resist that at all costs.
To make sense of its many multiverses, Marvel Comics began ordering them with number designations in the 1980s, claiming “Earth-616” for the main setting. Since 2008’s The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, Marvel Comics has designated the world in which the MCU films take place as Earth-199999. But lately Marvel Studios has firmly disagreed.
Instead, for two movies, the MCU has insisted that they are Earth-616 — a clerical technicality from which forum wars are born.
Related
Sony Pictures fired the first shot in the Earth-616 war in a stray line in Spider-Man: Far From Home. Quentin Beck, aka Mysterio — who falsely claims to have traveled between multiverses — refers to the MCU’s Earth as Earth-616. Of course, the easiest (and most correct) explanation of this is that Mysterio was a fraud, the line is just an Easter egg for fans, and it’s just a coincidence that he happened to pick the name of the main Marvel Comics universe.
Unfortunately for fans of disambiguation, Marvel Studios
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