Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness scriptwriter Michael Waldron has revealed that Spider-Man director Sam Raimi isn’t one for extended cuts.
Raimi has previously told the media his original cut for Doctor Strange 2 had an extra 30 minutes of footage, leading many to surmise that Disney must have pushed the director to make the runtime less imposing, as distributors are often in the habit of doing. But if Waldron’s recent interview with Murphy’s Multiverse is to be believed, it was actually Raimi himself who was always pushing for a shorter cut, and with good reason, too.
“Sam, to his credit, was always really pushing for a shorter runtime. And, you know, he felt that the movie needed to move because of just how it was structured. It’s a chase movie, it’s an adventure, […] it’s got some Jurassic Park DNA… and so in a movie like that, it just didn’t feel like we needed three hours of it.”
Waldron himself actually agrees with that approach, further noting:
“My threshold for boredom is astronomically low, and so I just have a phobia of the movie becoming exhausting. And so yeah, once we’re off to the races in this one, we just wanted to get on the ride and go on the ride, and when it’s over, get out of there.”
While Doctor Strange 2 admittedly revolves around Wanda Maximoff chasing Stephen Strange and America Chavez across the multiverse in a fast-paced narrative, we can’t help but wonder if a few extra minutes with the Illuminati, or Strange’s variants, for that matter, could have benefitted the movie greatly.
At any rate, it doesn’t seem like Raimi would be interested in including that extra footage for the movie’s home release, but let’s hope that we get chunks of that footage as deleted scenes somewhere down the line.