Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is directed by Sam Raimi, but do you know the rich career of this director with an unusual career?
An inventive handyman
Sam Raimi started at the bottom, all the way down. To shoot amateur short films with no budget. His first professional feature film is the mythical Evil Dead, which places his actor and friend Bruce Campbell face to face with dangerous demons who possess one by one the friends with whom he left to go green.
Shot for less than 400,000 dollars, this camera around a cabin lost in the woods and its inhabitants allows Raimi to be creative with his camera and to carry out plans which would require all the equipment with the means at hand!
Renaissance Pictures
Evil Dead (1981)
Very quickly, Raimi will switch to comedy with Mort sur le grill, a wacky comedy that he co-wrote with Joel and Ethan Coen, then direct two sequels to Evil Dead, also more humorous than horrific. In the second opus, Bruce Campbell faces his own hand, while the 3rd film sends him straight to the Middle Ages!
Elusive Choices
While he could have been confined to horror comedy, Raimi tries new things, as when he launches into the western with Dead or alive, which carries his visual paw and places Sharon Stone at the center of the story, surrounded of Gene Hackman and a very young Leonardo DiCaprio. He continues with one of his best films, the black comedy A Simple Plan, in which three workers find a nest egg and try to hide it.
TriStar Pictures
Sharon Stone in Dead or Alive
Unfortunately, A Simple Plan failed, as did his next film, For the Love of the Game, a “sentimental baseball flick” starring Kevin Costner. It is therefore logical that in order to bounce back, Raimi returns to the fantastic by staging Keanu Reeves and Cate Blanchett in Intuitions, the story of a woman able to read the future in the cards.
A superhero movie from 1990!
Between the two Evil Dead sequels, Raimi takes advantage of the success of Tim Burton’s Batman to stage Darkman, the story of a geneticist (Liam Neeson) disfigured by killers and who foments his revenge by inventing an identity secret. Exit the comedy, the tone is dark, horrifying and bloody.
Universal
Darkman
Two sequels will see the light of day without Liam Neeson, produced by Raimi: The Return of Durant and Darkman III. The first film is a nugget hidden in the filmography of its author, to catch up urgently and for which a sequel is in preparation:
During the 2000s, Raimi made three films for which he is most famous to date: the Spider-Man trilogy worn by Tobey Maguire. If they will not always be a pleasure to shoot, these feature films then ensure him an incredible success and a notoriety which still accompanies him to this day.
Columbia Pictures
Spider-Man versus the Green Goblin
It then becomes unimaginable for the majority of the public that Peter Parker will one day change his face as the role seems to stick to his interpreter, and Raimi seems to have found the right balance between humor and action. However, the third film, launched a little too quickly, divided the public and the planned fourth was canceled in favor of a reboot of the Marvel franchise.
Producer of cult series
Sam Raimi is also a prolific producer, since in the mid-1990s he launched the Hercules and Xena the Warrior series, but also in 2010 Spartacus or Ash vs Evil Dead (2015), following his film trilogy. He is also the financier of several horror films such as Poltergeist (2015), Don’t Breathe or Possessed (2012).
Universal Pictures
Xena the warrior, a series produced by Sam Raimi
During the 2010s, Raimi drifted away from directing despite two films that were largely worthy of watching: Down to Hell (2009) and The Great World of Oz (2013). He returned last Wednesday to our theaters with one of the biggest blockbusters of the year, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which also features an evil book, the Darkhold, which looks like a distant cousin of the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis from the Evil Dead movies. The circle is complete !
A final word: Danny Elfman
This composer should not be associated solely with Tim Burton, for whom he has provided most of the soundtracks until today. Danny Elfman also composed the music for 9 Sam Raimi films, including the Spider-Man trilogy, but also A Simple Plan.
Their first collaboration took place as early as Darkman (1990), and Elfman greatly contributed to giving Raimi’s films an extra breath and a distinct personality. And the two men are still on good terms, since they are working together again on Doctor Strange 2, currently in theaters!
5 things to know about Doctor Strange 2 (spoiler-free):