Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, all of them impacting the future of this connected universe.
Directed by Sam Raimi and set after the multiverse chaos in Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness saw Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) protecting WandaVision. America’s introduction led to the MCU explaining a couple of things about its multiverse, including something very important about dreams.
Right at the beginning of Doctor Strange 2, Strange has a dream about a variant of himself running away from danger with America, and when she arrives at Iron Man 3.
In Avengers: Infinity War, Tony Stark told Pepper Potts that he had a dream where they had a kid and they named them after Pepper’s “eccentric uncle”, Morgan, and he insisted that the dream felt very real. The Avengers, where he took the missile into space and almost died when he went into freefall, and as a result, he had recurring nightmares. In one scene, he has a nightmare about his near-death (though in the dream, he might have actually died) that causes one of his suits to almost attack Pepper, but after Doctor Strange 2, this scene takes a whole new meaning as Tony was not only witnessing but experiencing his death in another universe.
These two Iron Man moments are now more heartbreaking in different ways – the nightmares in Iron Man 3 mean that Tony experienced his death years before his sacrifice in Avengers: Endgame, while the dream in Infinity War means that he got to experience fatherhood before he and Pepper had Morgan, and he shared a bit more time with his daughter through that, though in another universe. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness did more than change the multiverse and open the door to bigger disasters and more dangerous threats, as it also changed the way many characters in the MCU have experienced things through dreams.
