“Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” dots director Sam Raimi’s comeback into moviemaking. It’s about 9 years since his most recent film. And 15 since his last in Marvel’s superhero genre.
The filmmaker helped create the genre with the original Tobey Maguire-led “Spider-Man”. Said returns to the layout for Marvel Studios, which started in 2008 with “Iron Man”. He said it’s very different from his time working on the Sony pictures between 2002 and 2007.
“It’s very exciting to see how Marvel has streamlined their operation.”
“It’s a wonderful place to work. There was nothing like that to help you as a filmmaker when productions were all one-offs before there was a company that simply saw to the integrity of the characters.”
Doctor Strange 2 Writer Had to Start From Scratch Once Sam Raimi Stepped In
Raimi was told to direct after the original Doctor Strange. Director Scott Derrickson stepped away from the sequel. After a meeting with Marvel brass and talking about the script for more than an hour, Raimi was back. He met with screenwriter Michael Waldron, and they decided to rebuild the script entirely. It was just days away from when shooting was scheduled to start.
He said, Waldron, creator and head writer of Season 1 of Loki, took on “Multiverse of Madness” immediately after completing the Disney+ series.
“As soon as I got brought on board, the first thing I did was read all of the WandaVision scripts because they were in the process of shooting that. And I went back and watched most of Sam’s films to try to [determine his strengths], in the same way that, if you’re going to be writing for a particular actor, you want to write towards their strengths.”
Waldron said:
“Above all else he’s unflappable under immense pressure, and believe me, we were under immense pressure for a long time. With Sam as our leader, it always felt like an adventure, never like a slog. The exciting thing was seeing how motivated all of that was by character, by story. Everything’s only in service of the characters, and that was really fun. I learned so much.”
Raimi said:
“Because this production had already been going in pre-production, it was a little bit of a moving train. We had a start date already, a composer and cinematographer had been hired, and production teams were setting up in London. Offices had already been acquired. But Michael and I wanted to tell our own story, so he really ended up rewriting the entire script from scratch.”
