Having initially been scheduled for release in May 2021, Marvel Cinematic Universe sequel Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was pushed back to November, and then March 2022, before finally settling on the current May 6 debut next year.
Given that Benedict Cumberbatch’s title hero played a significant supporting role in Spider-Man: No Way Home, one that ties directly into his hotly-anticipated second standalone adventure, you’d imagine the respective writing teams would be doing plenty of conferring as they cobbled their screenplays together at roughly the same time.
Of course, one major roadblock is that Multiverse of Madness was ordered back in front of cameras for extensive reshoots, long after No Way Home had called it a wrap. In an interview with Variety, writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers explained how the repeated delays for Doctor Strange 2 wound up having an effect on their own multiversal MCU effort.
“We were actually working off of things that were happening in Doctor Strange 2, and trying to incorporate them into our script. When we started writing, [Strange] knows firsthand the dangers of screwing with these things. Then we changed it so he was a person who doesn’t know that much about the multiverse. But that makes it even more frightening, to start fooling around with these things, because it’s the fear of the unknown. Either way, he was the voice of reason going, ‘You don’t mess with the fate of an individual’ — and Peter Parker being naive enough to go, ‘Why not? Why can’t we save these people?'”
Based on the teaser trailer that played before the lights came up on No Way Home before being released online shortly after, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness will make it perfectly clear that casting a spell atop the Statue of Liberty isn’t quite enough to prevent the fabric of reality from coming apart at the seams, and we can’t wait to see how it all pans out in just over five months.