Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is almost here, and this is the background info worth knowing before getting into theaters.
It’s been quite some time since the release of the original Doctor Strange movie, as director Sam Raimi’s upcoming Multiverse of Madness sequel is coming about five-and-a-half years after the first. A lot of MCU movies and shows have been released in the meantime, meaning that the landscape of the world and the stakes are wildly different. This movie now takes place in a “post-snap” universe, but even more than that are the consequences of Peter Parker and Doctor Strange’s actions in Spider-Man: No Way Home and Wanda Maximoff’s in WandaVision. It won’t be long before fans see for themselves, but there’s plenty of info to prep with between things looking to get trippy and bloody as the fabric of the multiverse reaches its breaking point, and Marvel Comics’ mysterious Illuminati stepping in to intervene. The most recent primer for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is, of course, the holiday mega-hit that was Spider-Man: No Way Home. While firmly an intimate Peter Parker tale — as Spider-Man fans would hope — it did so by simultaneously setting up the multiverse as the MCU’s next big frontier after the Infinity Saga. In Peter’s desperate attempt to right his past wrongs, Strange indulged the youngster’s pleas by using a spell to make everyone forget who Spider-Man was. After Peter messes with the Spell, which Wong admittedly and adamantly warned Strange against using, the multiverse gets fractured and timelines start bleeding into one another. This is what allows said “variants” of Marvel characters to appear and intertwine with the theatrical versions audiences have come to feel familiar with. Of course, No Way Home wasn’t the first to tee up this concept for the MCU. Disney+’s Loki, one of the most inventive projects Marvel Studios put together, heavily leaned into that concept for the series’ premise last summer. Trailers have already revealed variants of Strange himself will appear in the movie, from Defender Strange to the dark incarnation of the Sorcerer Supreme.
