According to Badass Digest’s Devin Faraci, who recently appeared on the “Meet the Movie Press” podcast, Marvel’s upcoming Doctor Strange film will not be an origin story. Instead the film is supposedly “not going to be twenty-minutes of [Stephen Strange] being a doctor,” and will jump right into the character being the fully-formed Sorcerer Supreme.
Faraci states that at one point, the film was a traditional superhero origin story, but that’s all changed now that Prometheus scribe Jon Spaihts is on board to rewrite the script previously penned by Sahara and Conan the Barbarian writer Joshua Oppenheimer.
“So, for Doctor Strange they’ve had a script in-house forever. It is a pretty standard origin story for Doctor Strange. It’s got Baron Mordo as the bad guy. That’s all gone. Marvel’s new thing is no more origin stories. So, Doctor Strange movie no longer has an origin. It begins in medias res. It has Dr. Strange already established as the Sorcerer Supreme. It is a totally new script. Jon Spaihts is working totally new, On his own, without any of the previous stuff. Not even touching the previous script.”
If true, this will be a refreshing take on a character new to the Marvel universe. Audiences have seen the tried-and-true, cookie-cutter format used for superhero origins so many times by now that filmmakers could easily change things up, jump right into the part of the story that we payed to see in the first place, and still yield successful results.
Doctor Strange will likely still explore some of the origins of the character, but do so through exposition or flashbacks, a la Batman Begins and Man of Steel.
What do you think of this news? Are you happy to hear that Doctor Strange won’t be an origin story? Sound off in the comments below…
Doctor Strange is helmed by Deliver us from Evil and Sinister director Scott Derrickson. No casting or release date information has been announced, but we expect to see the film hit theaters on July 8th, 2016.
Originally published August 17, 2014. Updated April 13, 2018.
