After helping Spider-Man repair the multiverse that the teen broke in Spider-Man: No Way Home, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Stephen Strange is back for his new solo film in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Last month’s trailer peeled back the cape on what’s in store for Stephen, and you won’t be too surprised to hear that this movie wants to be on the level of its direct predecessor.
Speaking to Empire Magazine, Cumberbatch hyped up what’s in store for his magical master’s sophomore outing, even going so far as to say it could have the success of Tom Holland’s Spidey capper. “It’s a big, big movie….I’ll put my flag in the sand,” he said. “If it brings off the level of the level of ambition it’s got, we’re going to have a success on the level of Spidey.” Big words, but perhaps not unfounded, given that the Marvel movies consistently earn absurdly well at the box office, and the hype fans have for characters that are either confirmed or believed to be in this movie.
However it does at the box office, Multiverse will see Strange explore more and more of the multiverse, about which we know frighteningly little. Various threads from recent MCU works WandaVision, What If? and Loki are all converging here, and it’ll be up to Strange to hopefully sort everything out before reality collapses at the seams. And like the first film and the Strange-specific episode of What If?, the movie will dig into the hero and remind him the hard way how his actions have consequences.
“There’s a lot of reckoning and a lot of self discovery,” teased Cumberbatch, who added that his hero is “a stranger to himself” for the early parts of the film. Ego and arrogance are at the heart of the MCU’s version of Strange, and trying to rewrite reality in No Way Home despite being told how bad of an idea it was by Wong (Benedict Wong) is one of the most dangerous things he’s done yet. We know that he’ll cross paths with an evil version of himself, and become a multi-armed monster during the film as well, and that sounds like just the tip of the iceberg. “The answers to the questions of who Strange really is won’t have easy answers….there are some very unexpected conclusions.”
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness releases on May 6.
Editor’s Note: Release dates within this article are based in the U.S., but will be updated with local Australian dates as soon as we know more.