When Marvel announced the next slate of movies, only a few months after Endgame ended the Infinity Saga, a few of them stood out. There was Black Panther 2, finally, the Black Widow solo flick, finally, and The Eternals, which just sounds wacky.
The most interesting titles may have been the Thor and Dr. Strange sequels. They announced that Taiki Waititi, who directed Ragnarok – my personal favorite of all the MCU titles – was returning to direct the next Thor sequel, Love and Thunder, complete with Natalie Portman wielding Mjolnir. And they revealed a title for the Dr. Strange sequel: Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
Which sounds intense, and which Kevin Feige suggested would be the MCU’s first horror movie. Which seemed a tad unlikely, and which he has since walked back a tad, saying, ““I wouldn’t necessarily say that’s a horror film, but it is, as Scott Derrickson, our director, has pitched it, it’ll be a big MCU film with scary sequences in it.”
Derrickson has since left the film over “creative differences,” but the director they’re trying to nab doesn’t exactly close the lid on those earlier “horror movie” comments.
Yesterday, Variety broke the news that Sam Raimi – the legendary director helped launch the new era of superhero movies with his Tobey Maguire Spider-Man trilogy – is in talks to potentially take the helm for the next Dr. Strange flick. Raimi broke onto the scene with the fun, and definitely horror, Evil Dead series and until Spider-Man was most well-known for his penchant for scary – but fun – flicks. That’s exactly what this new Dr. Strange movie should be.
Raimi hasn’t directed a movie since 2013, though he’s been busy producing projects, like the Poltergeist remake and the Evil Dead TV series. He’ll be managing a cast that includes Benedict Cumberbatch as the titular hero, Chiwetel Ejiofor as his former friend turned nemesis Karl Mordo, Benedict Wong as Strange’s fellow sorcerer, and Elizabeth Olsen, back as Wanda Maximoff, aka the Scarlet Witch, whose own TV show will premiere at the end of the year and promises to tie-in to this movie.
There is zero news on the plot of this movie, but with Raimi running things, the idea of a scary comic-book movie just got a lot more realistic. Remember the hospital scene in Spider-Man 2, when Dr. Octavius’s mechanical arms refuse to be removed? Here’s hoping we get 120+ minutes of that creepy vibe, complete with Raimi’s often over-the-top visual style. A horror-superhero hybrid should be directly in his wheelhouse. After all, he also directed Darkman with Liam Neeson, and that was fairly twisted in its own right.
Everyone’s wondering what the MCU is going to look like in a post-Thanos, post-Iron Man world, and allowing directors like Waititi and Raimi to run with it is definitely a good sign.
