Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

There have been complaints about MCU properties that feel like they exist merely to get people interested in the next movie or TV show, but it's never felt ...

By the time that “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” was pulling out the universe-bending scenes that will probably be spoiled by Friday afternoon, I started to wonder if there’s a breaking point to these CGI orgies that serve so many other properties they forget to be interesting on their own. It’s sad to see her and the character take a step back instead of exploring the ideas in the show that bore her name. It’s got a plot that could have creatively surprised viewers over and over with new variations on the very concept of a world with heroes in it and a director willing to go there. It’s very much a sequel to “WandaVision,” the show that expanded the Marvel Cinematic Universe into television. Think about how many properties are being sequel-ed in “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.” It’s a sequel to “ Doctor Strange,” although just barely in that you probably need to have seen that film less than the Strange adventures that followed. It’s a sequel to “ Avengers: Endgame” and “ Spider-Man: No Way Home” in that it references action in both films and extrapolates somewhat on the universe-saving decision that the title character made in the former.

Raimi is back to breathe some life into the MCU in 'Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,' the best Phase Four film yet.

Yet it’s telling that it feels like the reason Raimi was given more room to breathe is because of how muddled and messy the development process was, the equivalent of a creative during a shoot throwing their hands up and shouting “WE’LL DO IT IN POST” when the lighting doesn’t work out exactly as they intended it to in-camera, outsourcing their role to as an on-set craftsman to some people in a post-production house. Let me be clear: With the exception of a single mid-film reveal so eye-rollingly executed until the man who made Evil Dead II steps in and goes much harder than he needs to in that particular moment (you can almost feel him turn over the keys to Feige when it happens, as he leaves for a break so he can check on how the make-up guys are coming along), everything that people will enjoy on a minute-to-minute basis on this film is due to Sam Raimi being shot caller. Take, for instance, the film’s first major action sequence, coming after an obstacle course “escape” scene in the World-Between-Worlds or whatever, full of cotton candy clouds and collapsing buildings, as if someone hired the Thor concept design team to remake a Katy Perry video, in which an alternate Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), a teen from a distance universe who can summon portals to other dimensions, try to get a book of unimaginable power before they’re killed by a reality-intruding monster. That’s not wholly a dig at those comic book takes on the likes of Melville and Homer, because there was value in introducing them to kids in an easily digestible format: the problem only comes when they assume that it’s a substitute for reading Moby Dick or The Odyssey. Raimi’s Spider-Man films operated in a similar capacity, forcing nerds, much as Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher did, to acknowledge that people behind the camera play an essential role in shaping in translating these works for the screen, which is an approach that’s being slowly lost on the Disney side, under the metaphorical corporate thumb, as profit-oriented as it is predictably banal in execution. The disastrous behind-the-scenes drama during the making of Thor: The Dark World — which saw Patty Jenkins fired from the production and replaced by Alan Taylor, he of Game of Thrones fame weeks into shooting — was a rare PR failure for Feige and an opportunity for the Distinguished Competition to seize upon the one culture-war mountaintop that it seemed impossible for the Mouse to climb, which they grabbed by the throat as soon as they hired Jenkins to direct Wonder Woman. Since then, Feige’s attempted to grow filmmakers along with franchises, no matter the prestige of the names involved, dangling one-for-us-one-for-you shots at passion projects as a Faustian bargain to guarantee their fealty. It’s not a particularly high bar to clear when your film is competing against the likes of Black Widow, Shang-Chi, and Eternals, each of which featured ill-chosen directors smacking up against the outer walls of their skills in service of material that either couldn’t sustain a long-term series in the comic world (the first of the three) or had trouble escaping the gravity of audience/fan indifference in the before being brought to the big screen (the latter two). Little good has come from the MCU’s wilderness period following the departure of its biggest stars, and the diversification of the distribution of their media properties has added even more of a headache for those seeking to try and understand exactly what the hell is going on on-screen at any given point, even if they’ve devoted three calendar days of their lives attempting to keep up with these movies.

The Spider-Man director adds some much needed flair to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Raimi runs right toward that madcap future, keeping Multiverse of Madness silly and loose and less concerned with the maintenance of careful branding. In Multiverse of Madness, the death of an entire universe, trillions of souls, is alluded to. Mortal stakes are much harder to render when there’s a very similar version of the same person—or alien, or god, or whoever—lurking just one croissant-layer of spacetime away. It’s a clever, kicky subversion of fan-service expectations, suggesting for a scene or two that the movie has a more developed vision of how to please, and surprise, an audience. The opening act of the film is hurried and featureless, the Marvel tank low on gas and Raimi seemingly stymied by the difficulty of taking the reins of a world so long after its genesis. Of course, now that we’re dealing with the multiverse, any of those characters could come back in a future film.

Weekend box office preview 'Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness' eyeing a $160M-$180M opening in North America plus another $140M+ overseas.

Contrary to the 2016 film, Doctor Strange 2 is doing a simultaneous global release including all offshore markets in its opening suite. Looking at other MCU pics, Thor: Ragnarok opened to $141M offshore, and Captain Marvel — the film between the blips, which made it essential viewing — did $194M in like-for-likes. That would yield at least a $300M worldwide start, which would rep the second-best box office debut of the Covid era after No Way Home‘s $582M WW and ahead of The Batman‘s $251M WW. Similar to Batman, Doctor Strange 2 won’t have Russia and China in its offshore bookings. That’s not the best comp, given that the MCU expanded afterward to include new characters on the big screen — and the blip. It’s a fun week for Marvel fans as the season finale to another multiverse mindbender, Moon Knight, drops on Disney+ at midnight tonight. Does it play strictly to the Marvel fans, or will it rally the unfaithful?

Sam Raimi returns to the world of superheroes, but not even his signature horror-tinged style can save a franchise content to spin its wheels.

Yes, it’s really cool and fun to see the action figures bash together, especially when it’s filmed with the same whirlwind mania that fueled some of Sam Raimi’s best pictures. Raimi gets to play with his toys, especially in matters concerning Wanda’s witchy powers and her capacity for mindfuckery; fans of the Evil Deads and Drag Me to Hell will clap like a seal at every delightful whip-pan, anamorphic lens, and angle heavily Dutched courtesy of DP John Mathieson (Gladiator). Even Danny Elfman gets in on the fun once in a while, though apart from a few decidedly music-forward sequences his usual whimsy blends into the background. With Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the soul-deadening bloat of these films becomes ever clearer, mostly because you can see a great, inventive filmmaker trying, and failing, to style his way out of it. These are interesting ideas, and if Multiverse of Madness could stop for a second to explore them with more than rote platitudes, it could be interesting. Screenwriter Michael Waldron ( Loki) takes the reins here for a script that has to serve too many masters — a meditation on grief (as love persevering, yadda yadda), special-effects spectacle, cross-universal fanservice, place setting for future entries in the Marvel universe, the list goes on. Now, with the MCU nearing its thirtieth cinematic installment, in a “Phase” of the films seemingly wholly focused on the infinite capacities of the multiverse, the MCU paradoxically feels smaller and more perfunctory than ever.