The most memorable movies and TV shows about alternate universes

Time travel AND an alternate universe! Technically, it’s more a reworked reality, but it’s alternative to what Marty McFly knows, and also this movie lets us combine two sci-fi tropes. What happens in the sequel to the massive “Back to the Future” is that Marty and Doc have to go to, well, the future (all the way to 2015!) and when doing so Marty finds a sports almanac that includes results from 1950 through 2000. It ends up in the hands of 2015 Biff, who takes it 1955 to give it to his younger self. That Biff uses the almanac to become rich on sporting events, so when Marty returns to 1985 Hill Valley, it has become a dystopia.

We know Loki as played by Tom Hiddleston. This Loki dies in “Avengers: Infinity War,” but there are other versions of this Loki. Also, other Lokis of all sorts. One is an alligator! The show “Loki” introduces us to alternate timelines, which the TVA works to cull to maintain the “sacred timeline.” This leads to a trippy, often funny, show that really showcases Hiddleston in the role.

The first season of “Russian Doll,” the great one, isn’t really an alternate universe story, though it kind of is. No, Natasha Lyonne’s Nadia is trapped in a time loop, not unlike Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day,” though this time loop always ends with her dying. Having solved that in the first season, the second season had to reinvent itself. This time, Nadia is able to ride a subway train that takes her back to 1982, and also eventually places her in the body of her mother.

What is the Upside Down, if not an alternate universe? It’s basically spookified Hawkins, right? The same buildings, just a bunch of monsters. “Stranger Things” found a lot of promising young actors (and also rekindled the career of David Harbour) while managing to thread the needle of indebtedness to ‘80s pop culture, but at its core it’s a show about two universes atop one another.

Fox’s cult sci-fi show ran for five seasons and 100 episodes. It focuses on a new FBI division called the Fringe Division. “Fringe” is kind of like “The X-Files,” but less gross and more focused on a parallel universe. In fact, when the parallel universe stuff started to hit with audiences, “Fringe” basically gave up the “mystery of the week” thing and really delved into the parallel universe of it all.

We’re sure that over the many flavors of “Star Trek” across the years that there have been several parallel universe stories. However, in the reboot film from 2009, the one that stars Chris Pine as James T. Kirk for the first time, an alternate universe, in the form of an alternate timeline, proves crucial. It also allows “Star Trek” to tie in the classic, iconic version of that world, as Leonard Nimoy appears as a Spock from that other timeline.

It was an Oscar darling, even the Best Picture winner. “Everything Everywhere All at Once” also was a surprise hit. Ke Huy Quan and Michelle Yeoh are excellent in the film. A film that is full of parallel universes where stuff is, like, totally random. Like, can you believe how random it is? Okay, so maybe we’ve tipped our hand in terms of having major issues with the storytelling and the screenplay, but there are at least two strong performances in the movie.

This is the second, and last, MCU project we will mention. The whole multiverse thing has taken over Marvel’s world. We will shout out this one, because it literally has “Multiverse” in the title. Also, because it’s directed by Sam Raimi, and that’s cool. There are even some classic Raimi touches in the film, and not just the cameo from Bruce Campbell.

In Henry Selick’s stop-motion adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s story, young Coraline is bored with her life in her new small town. Then, she finds a door in the family’s new apartment, and it takes her to an alternate version of her own world. At first, it all seems like a dream. Of course, that wouldn’t make for much of a film, so let’s just say that things in the other universe are not what they seem.

Michael Jordan, still at the peak of his fame, got a chance to star in a film. Sure, he was just playing himself, but he still couldn’t quite pull it off. The sports comedy is really built around the Looney Tunes as much as Jordan. In “Space Jam,” it is established that the Looney Tunes live in their own universe within Earth, one that they need to pull MJ into so he can help them beat the Nerdlucks at basketball.

This is technically a movie, though it went direct-to-DVD and most people probably didn’t see it until it debuted on Cartoon Network in 2020. For those not in the know, there was a TV adaptation of the “Teen Titans” comics in 2003 that was fairly serious and apparently has a lot of passionate fans. We know this, because when “Teen Titans Go!,” an absurdist comedy show, debuted, quite a few “Teen Titans” fans were up in arms about the silliness of the new show and how it “tarnished the legacy” of the original (we can only assume the phrase “ruined my childhood” was used a few times). In a move that feels almost like a “screw you” to those fans, this movie features both versions of the Titans, established as being from two (of many) universes, joining forces. The vibe is pure “Teen Titans Go!,” though.

This is another non-theatrical film based on a TV show, but this one debuted on TV. Phineas and Ferb are two boys on endless summer vacation with a knack for building fantastical machines. This time around, though, they help the (not so) nefarious scientist Dr. Doofenshmirtz with his “Other-Dimension-Inator,” which opens the door to another dimension where a more successful, and more evil, version of Doofenshmirtz rules their native Tri-State area.

What if you were a Disney princess who suddenly found yourself in the real world? That is the conceit of “Enchanted.” Giselle is taken from her animated kingdom of Andlasia and dropped into real-world New York City. Obviously, there is a bit of a culture clash. Giselle is played with aplomb by Amy Adams in both this film and its delayed sequel “Disenchanted” which dropped on Disney+ in 2022.

Huh, maybe Henry Selick has a thing for parallel universes. Also, do we still need to remind people that Selick directed “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and that Tim Burton only produced it? Probably, right? It turns out that there is a forest full of portals to holiday towns, like Halloween Town and Christmas Town. Jack Skellington, pumpkin king of Halloween Town, stumbles into Christmas town and decides he should become the new Santa Claus. It doesn’t go great.

It begat three different TV franchises, which take their own approaches to universes, and our universe, but it began with a 1994 movie that paved the way for Roland Emmerich to direct “Independence Day.” “Stargate” stars Kurt Russell and James Spader, and it features the titular Stargate. This device creates wormholes that send people, or aliens, all over the infinite realm of space.

There is so much wrong with this fiasco of a film. “Super Mario Bros.” is so bad, Nintendo spent over two decades afraid to license their products for another film. One of the many misfires of the movie is the parallel universe element. So, to the extent we can follow it, when the meteor hit Earth 65 million years ago, it created two parallel universes. In one of them, dinosaurs kept evolving until they look like Dennis Hopper? In the other, Bob Hoskins is an Italian-American plumber, and he and his brother Luigi end up in the other universe.

We consider Narnia a parallel universe. It’s a fantasy world completely unlike our own. Their Jesus is a lion! Also, you get there by going into a piece of furniture. If that isn’t fantastical, and parallel to our reality, what is? This is the first film in the franchise, the one that most people saw before all but the biggest fans of C.S. Lewis’ novels checked out. Too much religious overtone, perhaps?

There is a town in Maine called Storybrooke. It turns out, aside from the main character Emma and her son Henry, pretty much everybody in town is a fairy tale character. They all also exist in a fairy tale world that we see as the show bounces between the two alternate universes. There’s Snow White, Jiminy Cricket, Rapunzel, and so on. Basically, “Once Upon a Time” is a fairy tale clearing house.

Marvel has gotten pretty into hiring “Rick and Morty” writers, maybe because that show is built on parallel universes. The show began as a one-note “Back to the Future” riff many years ago, and grew to be…slightly more than that. “Rick and Morty” built up a passionate fan base, but a cultish one. These days, the show goes on even without creator Justin Roiland, who was ousted for a litany of indiscretions.

In the 2024 sci-fi thriller from Apple TV+, Joel Edgerton plays Jason Dessen. Jason is a physicist in Chicago, but he and an alternate version of himself from another universe swap places. Unfortunately, the other Jason is more insidious, and the first Jason is in a desperate quest to return to his own universe to save his family from his other self.