Doctor Strange

Benedict Cumberbatch returns as surgeon-superhero Stephen Strange, now on a mission to protect a teen who can visit parallel universes.

There is a funny scene in which they arrive in a version of New York where everything is decorated with plants and flowers (inspired by the High Line, perhaps), where you “go” on a red signal and where fast food is served in little balls. Familiar supporting characters recur: Benedict Wong is back, entertainingly playing Sorcerer Supreme, and Chiwetel Ejiofor is Strange’s old enemy Mordo. The Ancient One (played in the first film by Tilda Swinton and the subject of a brief culture-war casting row) is absent. America has the ability to “dreamwalk” – to enter into other parallel universes – and it is an ability she can’t control and which has enraged this demon; Strange realises it is his destiny to protect her.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is "as gleefully outlandish as any independent cult movie", writes Nicholas Barber.

But it's also as gleefully outlandish as any independent cult movie – and there is no way Raimi could have made anything like it without Marvel's footing the bill and laying the groundwork. But Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness feels like a Raimi project to the core. Raimi hasn't had a new film out since Oz the Great and Powerful in 2013, so maybe he put all of the craziest ideas he'd had in the past decade into this one. He has rightly given McAdams and Wong much more to do than they had in the previous Doctor Strange film, and he has incorporated lots of big surprises that the studio has managed to keep quiet about. There's plenty of CGI-dependent action to enjoy, but for a while the film doesn't seem like essential viewing for anyone except devoted Marvel fans. But suddenly he has other urgent business to attend to: an enormous one-eyed octopus monster is chasing a girl called America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) down the streets of Manhattan.

The new Doctor Strange movie, directed by Sam Raimi and starring Benedict Cumberbatch, is moderately entertaining, if predictably excessive.

That’s not the chief preoccupation of Doctor Strange in The Multiverse of Madness, but it sets the stage for the movie’s best scenes, the ones in which Cumberbatch and McAdams, both charming and perceptive performers, get to interact with one another as human beings rather than as place markers in front of a green screen. The studio behind Doctor Strange in the Multiverse, Disney, has strongly cautioned those writing about the film against “revealing spoilers, cameos, character developments and detailed story points,” with the aim of giving audiences around the world the opportunity to enjoy their “movies to the fullest,” as opposed to just enjoying them moderately, which wouldn’t do at all. That vibe, at least, permeates this Doctor Strange, even if most of the action—extravagant, messy, so over-the-top crazy that it ceases to be amazing—is business as usual in the Marvel world. Still, there are good reasons for terrific directors to take on these movies, which are the same reasons so many actors want to be in them: they’re the chief currency of the culture right now, and if an artist’s goal to is to reach people with a work of the imagination—even if that vision is essentially run through a Play Doh Pumper before it reaches the screen—who wants to be left out? And even in the midst of its typically (for Marvel movies) convoluted plot, The Multiverse of Madness has a Raimi-like sense of bleak humor: Dr. Stephen Strange, a flawed superhero who often does the wrong thing for the right reasons, is again played, as in the 2016 movie preceding this one, by Benedict Cumberbatch. Again, he plays the character with one eyebrow perpetually arched, as it should be. The best thing you can say about the moderately entertaining, if predictably excessive, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is that if you squint and concentrate really hard, you can tell it’s a Sam Raimi movie.

Director Sam Raimi returns to Marvel for the mind-melting Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, one of the weirdest and most ambitious MCU entries of ...

Gomez, who’s got appealing screen presence and fits the part, is too often reduced to the role of exposition machine in the course of the film’s events, and her performance suffers for it. Elfman’s score also adds a great deal to the sense of disorientation, mixing grandiose strings with discordant single notes on the piano, and even the occasional screeching guitar. It’s Wanda’s search for her two sons, directly following up the events of 2021’s WandaVision TV series, that makes it fortuitous when she crosses paths with America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), a young woman who seems to be the only person in existence with the ability to travel between universes. Yet it’s also very much in line with Raimi’s ability to empathize with even the most lost souls in all his movies, a part of the director’s toolbox that’s supported by Michael Waldron’s zigzagging yet heartfelt script. It’s also very much a Sam Raimi movie, and perhaps the most singularly identifiable vision of an MCU director since James Gunn sprang Guardians of the Galaxy on us nearly eight years ago. Directed by Sam Raimi, who is making his first Marvel movie and first superhero outing since completing his pre-MCU webslinging trilogy in 2007 with Spider-Man 3, Multiverse of Madness lives up to its title in all sorts of ways.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022). Marvel Studios/rated PG-13/126 minutes. Directed by Sam Raimi, written by Michael Waldron.

You don’t need to have seen Ant-Man to understand Thor: Ragnarök, and you don’t need to have seen Black Panther understand Spider-Man: No Way Home. Nor do you need to have watched WandaVision to smile when Doctor Strange gets into a, uh, music battle, to be startled by the jump scares and be impressed by the tactile visuals on display. Michael Waldron’s screenplay isn’t afraid to let its “not a white guy” characters be flawed, wrong, problematic or ineffectual, and it’s not afraid to dip into some think-piece-friendly tropes for the sake of efficient storytelling. Oh, and folks who were especially invested in Wanda’s “It’s about trauma!” narrative on the Disney+ show (or folks displeased by the notion of a female villain wreaking havoc over their inability to be a mother) will find themselves as annoyed by Multiverse of Madness as Game of Thrones fans who named their daughters Daenerys. Again, by coincidence or design, much of this film seems a response to a fandom that views the MCU as a kind of progressive moral arbiter and/or makes their fandom a defining part of their personality. The rest of the film features Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), Wong (Benedict Wong) and American Chavez doing their best to hold off a relentless, superpowered murder witch, an adventure that sends them to different universes and occasionally sees them interacting with alternate versions of themselves and/or other established MCU characters. That’s neither compliment nor criticism, but it underlines how Multiverse of Madness is “just a movie.” Multiverse-hopping aside, it’s still a stand-alone adventure with little overall impact on the overall MCU. This Doctor Strange sequel feels like an intentional throwback to when the MCU was just another big-budget Hollywood franchise, one that wasn’t expected to make the world a better place or be the one-stop-shop for blockbuster thrills and/or onscreen representation. It’s a good thing the spectacle delivers, because the story is pretty one-note, and the characters are mostly there for exposition and action sequences. The violence is as brutal and cruel as it’s been since the bad guys in Iron Man led a terrified family into a cave and machine gun-massacred them just offscreen. Yes, the film expects you to be familiar with the events of Doctor Strange and the last two Avengers films, but even explicit references to WandaVision are mostly there for those in the know. The top-secret cameos, which sadly are not Winnie the Pooh or Statler and Waldorf, are mostly confined to a mid-film sequence whereby Strange and Chavez travel to a rather idealistic version of Earth that looks like Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland. I’m guessing this is a version of Earth where Al Gore rightfully won the 2000 presidential election, but this universe’s Stephen Strange is A) dead and B) not exactly anyone’s favorite superhero. Yes, as revealed twenty minutes into the 126-minute picture, the big bad is the Scarlett Witch herself. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is a mostly stand-alone horror-fantasy adventure.

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.

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.

The last time Sam Raimi made a comic-book movie, nobody had ever heard of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That film was Spider-Man 3, in 2007, the final ...

Across his many Marvel appearances, Cumberbatch has alternated between playing the know-it-all Strange as a stuffy prig and a more mischievous wisecracker, but Raimi helps him strike the right chord—befuddled, brusque but caring, and struggling to stay just one step ahead of anyone around him. Describing Multiverse of Madness involves writing around so much—even revealing the film’s central villain would be a spoiler, though far more intriguing plot twists are buried in the final act. But once the dimension-hopping kicked off, Raimi’s goofy, morbid sense of humor started to assert itself on-screen, and Multiverse of Madness settled into a far more satisfying rhythm. His camera is a character of its own, with shots that lurch, zoom across rooms, and crash into actors’ faces with anarchic impunity. Multiverse of Madness is overstuffed with the usual fan bait, but it’s also undeniably a Sam Raimi movie, and a remarkably good one at that. It picks up after the last Marvel entry, Spider-Man: No Way Home, in which the prickly super-magician Doctor Strange (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) appears, waving his arms around with staccato fury to open portals and alter people’s memories en masse.

This month's LGBTQ-inclusive watchlist includes a buzzy new Marvel movie, a "Downton Abbey" film spinoff and an abundance of drag queens.

In “Bob’s Burgers: The Movie,” it’s high season for the mom-and-pop burger joint, but, as usual, something disastrous stands in the way of commercial success: a giant sinkhole that opens up right in front of the restaurant. The new series, “Ten Percent,” features a London agency, Nightingale Hart, modeled after its Parisian equivalent, Agence Samuel Kerr. In addition to the host of assistants, talent and other agents, the British office boasts its very own Andréa, the impossibly cool lesbian heartbreaker who’s known for staging hostile takeovers. “On the Count of Three” is a black comedy about best friends Val (Carmichael) and Kevin (Christopher Abbott), who make a suicide pact and then spend their final day together, getting their affairs in order. The deadpan comedy series “Hacks” was somewhat of a sleeper hit when it premiered in May 2021. Since it began airing on Fox in 2011, the offbeat series has been one of the most LGBTQ-friendly shows on mainstream television. The cast of already crowned queens includes: Jaida Essence Hall, Jinkx Monsoon and Monét X Change. Helping RuPaul and the veteran co-panelists decide who takes home the title of “Queen of All Queens” is a buzzy collection of guest stars, including Cameron Diaz, Naomi Campbell, Ronan Farrow and Nancy Pelosi. And back at the estate in England, Mary (Michelle Dockery) supervises a film crew that’s shooting on location in exchange for funds to repair the house. And this month, “On the Count of Three,” his directorial debut, is released in theaters. It is the second showdown between Disney and the Saudi government in a year, after “Eternals” was banned across the Persian Gulf states for featuring the MCU’s first gay superhero and his husband. His third stand-up special for HBO, “Rothaniel,” was an immediate success when it premiered April 1 — in no small part because he used it as an opportunity to come out to the world. In addition to the female leads, the campy series features a host of hilarious actors playing people you’d expect to find at a QVC-like network. In a stroke of luck, Joanna lands her dream job as a TV personality on the home shopping channel SVN and comes face to face with her hero, the network’s most beloved host, Jackie Stilton (Molly Shannon). While Jackie instantaneously takes to the newbie, the rest of Joanna’s co-workers and her new boss, Patricia (Jenifer Lewis), prove harder to win over.

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?

After 27 box office-shattering blockbusters, the Marvel superhero films have no more worlds to conquer -- so they are headed off to parallel universes ...

a what-is-reality Marvel brainteaser and, at moments, a bit of an ordeal." IndieWire called the movie a "a violent, wacky, drag-me-to-several-different-hells at once funhouse of a film." It's very, very beautiful." A review from The Hollywood Reporter says the parallel universes concept -- on top of Marvel films' previous time-travel forays -- "starts to look like a franchise-sustaining crutch." "Multiverse of Madness" -- the second standalone "Doctor Strange" movie -- is packed with references not just to films that preceded it, but also to Disney+ television series "WandaVision" and "Loki." It's beautiful.