Director Scott Derickson had to step down from Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. His rumored replacement should have superhero movie fans very excited: Sam Raimi. Raimi has an important legacy role in the genre as his Spider-Man films arguably paved the way for the MCU and everything else we see in theaters now. The director has struggled with wide release success since. Spider-Man 3 was abysmal but much of that can be contributed to studio interference (see how Sony mishandles almost everything). Raimi’s prequel movie Oz the Great and Powerful was a pretty big creative mess that has not led to the franchise you could tell it was hoping to set up. Raimi’s strengths have always been in over the top horror and the bits and pieces we know about the Multiverse of Madness hint that it could be a perfect match.
Don’t forget that Raimi is a huge fan of Stan Lee & Steve Ditko’s collaborative period on Amazing Spider-Man and the same Marvel duo are responsible for creating and developing Doctor Strange. I would expect Raimi to lean in to the books published when he was a kid which promises an emphasis on the multi-dimensional weirdness of Strange.
In related news, Disney+ put out a teaser during the Superbowl for its Marvel-related shows. We got glimpses of The Falcon and Winter Soldier, Loki, and WandaVision. WandaVision has already been reported to act as a prequel of sorts to Multiverse of Madness and Scarlet Witch will be a major character in that movie. My suspicions are that Wanda takes up the dark arts to try and resurrect her lost love The Vision. Her work will create fissures in the fabric of reality, opening things up to the titular Multiverse. I hope this plants the seeds of the X-Men but we’ll see when we get there. The infuriating part about this teaser is that all three of these shows won’t show up on the streaming platform until the Fall with WandaVision not showing up until post-Thanksgiving. Even more of a reason to pause your subscription for a few months.
A couple of trailers dropped from Amazon Studios for some pretty interesting looking films.
The Vast of Night
Blow the Man Down
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