Father travels across various realities to save wife and son

Question

I vaguely recall this movie and desperately want to identify what it is. These are the memories I have of it.

• Father (main character) makes the decision not to pursue career and focus on his family (wife and one kid) while old friend/nemesis become very successful.
• Family gets kidnapped or threaten by someone who turns out is the main character but from a different timeline where he became a renowned scientist and built a box-like machine to travel across realities. This machine requires some kind of serum to be used.
• He visits multiple realities including one where the world is covered in snow completely frozen and another one with a plague killing most people.
• Family is saved but a ton of additional copies of himself show up also wanting to get their family back (but there is a single copy of said family). Cliffhanger is a huge fight in some remote cabin where they were trying to hide from them.
• Turns out the machine is controlled by emotions so the kid is in charge of relocating the family, this way the other copies of the protagonist won't find them.

I have a very visual memory, I don't recall any name sadly. Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

This is the 2016 novel Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch.

You hit all of the highlights, but here's some of the plot summary from Wikipedia:

Jason Dessen, a former quantum mechanics physicist, is a college physics professor who lives in Chicago with his wife, Daniela and their son Charlie. One day Jason is kidnapped and drugged. He wakes up in a science laboratory and stumbles out of a metal cube. He discovers that he is in an alternate Chicago where, fifteen years previously, he had decided not to marry Daniela and had pursued his career as a physicist instead. In this world he built the cube that enables the occupants to move between the countless worlds created from every possible outcome of every event.

Wikipedia says that they are working on a television adaptation, but it's still in production. There's a movie from 2007 and a television series from 2015 that share the novel's title, but both appear to be unrelated.

I listened to the audiobook through my local library, which I would recommend.