‘Run Lola Run’ at 25: How the movie ran a multiverse ahead of its time

Listen up, Marvel Cinematic Universe. Twenty-five years ago, a small, low-budget German film titled “Run Lola Run” took the world by storm, starring Franka Potente.

Listen up, Marvel Cinematic Universe. Twenty-five years ago, a small, low-budget German film by the name of “Run Lola Run” took the world by storm. Looking back, its director sees parallels between his visionary movie and the multiverse films that have become tentpole blockbusters today. Starring a magenta-haired Franka Potente, “Lola” follows the titular heroine as she must race across Berlin to help her lackey mobster boyfriend (Moritz Bleibtreu) out of a life-threatening bind… and somehow find 100,000 Deutsche Marks along the way. One of the principal aspects of the film that makes it so special is how it’s divided into three parts, vignettes that re-imagine Lola’s predicament and follow her along a slightly different chain of events, each leading to a drastically different outcome. “The whole idea that you start from the same moment again, and you create a parallel universe” was at the core of his film, “Lola” director Tom Tykwer said in a recent interview with CNN. And while he made the distinction that “Run Lola Run” is a film in which each vignette ends and “resets” the story – instead of coexisting with the alternative stories that follow – when asked if he thought the whole multiverse trend began around the time of his film, Tykwer replied, “Conceptually, yes.”