When Sam Raimi signed up for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness many worried his signature style would be left by the wayside. After all, he was coming to a film already deep into pre-production, Marvel Studios are known for encouraging directors to work within their house style, and Raimi himself said “the job is to complete mile 16 of a bridge that had been under construction for 15 years.”
All those fears proved baseless, with the final product so much of a Sam Raimi movie that many fans even dubbed it the real Evil Dead 4. Now writer Michael Waldron, during a chat with Entertainment Weekly, has given us a better idea of the production process and how Raimi’s input helped steer the tone of the movie as well as broke many ‘rules’ of the MCU.
“Yeah, and that’s all Sam and Kevin. I had the freedom to write crazy s— because I knew that Sam was gonna do it, and it’d look awesome. So much of the crazy, awesome stuff in the movie isn’t even stuff that I wrote. It’s just stuff that Sam did and found on the day. It was my job to give him a blueprint, and that’s all he needed.”
Multiverse of Madness will likely see a home release sometime in late June/early July and we’re hoping for some BTS information showing us what happened during the shift between directors. It’s notable that there doesn’t seem to be any bad blood between Marvel Studios and original director Scott Derrickson, so we may see him turn up to talk about why they abandoned his vision for the sequel.
But the real meat will be in Raimi’s contributions, especially how he managed to squeeze so much of his distinctive horror style into the movie. It’s difficult to imagine the “Dreamwalking” sequence, or the zombie Strange scene being half as good without his input, so him talking us through these particularly spectacular moments would be a treat.
More on the Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness home release as we hear it, but right now the movie is still available for viewing in theaters.