Michael Waldron has appeared out of nowhere to become a firm favorite of Kevin Feige, having initially been hired as the head writer of Loki. His work impressed the Marvel Studios boss enough that he was paired up with Sam Raimi to crack the story for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and now he’s also set to pen Feige’s in-development Star Wars movie as part of a first-look deal with Disney.
It’s been a meteoric rise to say the least, and based on the very little we know so far, the Sorcerer Supreme’s sequel is shaping up to be one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s most exciting blockbusters yet. Elizabeth Olsen has teased a horror show vibe, and various rumors have touted it as the franchise’s most fear-driven effort to date.
That’s a little ironic when you consider original director Scott Derrickson helmed Sinister and its sequel, along with The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Deliver Us from Evil, but Raimi is hardly a slouch when it comes to scares either as the brains behind The Evil Dead series and Drag Me to Hell. In a new interview, Waldron teased that when he boarded Multiverse of Madness, he picked up from where the previous creative team left off by taking the story in a scarier direction.
“Yeah, I mean I think you know that’s obviously something that Scott Derrickson, the director of the first movie, does so well. Obviously that influence, you feel it in the first one. Even though it’s not a horror movie, there is like this sort of spookiness throughout it. It’s part of what makes that movie work so well and everything.
So when we came onto this one, we were, I felt so fortunate, the work he’d done on the first one, the work that he and the previous writer on the second one, Jade Bartlett, you know they’ve done some work on the second one, and it’s like you just dive in. In this case, COVID just gave me and Sam more time to make it our own thing. It’s cool, I’m glad that there was the chance to maybe push in a slightly scarier direction. Just because Sam does that so well.”
Nobody would try and argue that Benedict Cumberbatch’s first solo outing is one of the MCU’s top-tier efforts, but Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness certainly possesses more than enough potential to ascend to that pantheon. The cast and crew are all proven talents, with the concept perfectly lending itself to a wild, weird, wonderful, and potentially terrifying adventure.