During Marvel Studios’ Phase Four reveal at last year’s San Diego Comic-Con, Marvel chief Kevin Feige described Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness as the studio’s first “scary movie”, and now he’s elaborated on that description, clarifying that the sequel won’t be a straight up horror, bur rather “a big MCU film with scary sequences in it”.
“Multiverse of Madness is the greatest title we’ve ever come up with, by the way, which is one thing that’s exciting about it,” said Feige at the New York Film Academy. “I wouldn’t necessarily say that’s a horror film, but it’ll be a big MCU film with scary sequences in it. I mean, there are horrifying sequences in Raiders of the Lost Ark that I as a little kid I would [cover my eyes] when their faces melted. Or Temple of Doom, of course, or Gremlins, or Poltergeist. These are the movies that invented the PG-13 rating, by the way. They were PG and then they were like, ‘We need another [rating].’ But that’s fun. It’s fun to be scared in that way, and not a horrific, torturous way, but a way that is legitimately scary — because [director] Scott Derrickson is quite good at that — but scary in the service of an exhilarating emotion.”
Meanwhile, Feige also went on to suggest that Multiverse of Madness will also serve to introduce some unexpected new faces to the MCU: “The next Doctor Strange film, for instance, features some new MCU characters which will be making their debut in that movie you won’t expect or won’t guess who it is but we found a cool way to make it work because we want to make a particular type of movie there and there was a character who we always wanted to do something with who will fit really well there.”
Although plot details for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness are being kept under wraps, we do know that Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sorcerer Supreme is set to be joined in the cast by Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff, and that the movie will be connected in some fashion to the Disney+ TV shows WandaVision and Loki. Rumours have also surfaced recently claiming that the villain Nightmare will appear in both WandaVision and Multiverse of Madness.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is set for release on May 7th 2021.