Doctor Strange’s behavior in Spider-Man: No Way Home caught fans off guard: reckless? Thoughtless? Today, the writers provide the answer to his somewhat casual attitude towards the multiverse.
Everything that follows in this article SPOILE Spider-Man: No Way Home. Read on if you’ve seen the movie or don’t mind the spoilers.
How could Doctor Strange let Peter Parker make him cast a spell that potentially opens the door to the multiverse in Spider-Man: No Way Home? Why is he taking such a risk? Why doesn’t he tell her that magic isn’t used to fix the special cases of superheroes?
All of these questions have one answer, and it’s much more down to earth than you might think. It is linked to the writing of the film itself.
Indeed, the writers of the new Spider-Man trilogy, Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, had to deal with an unforeseen event: the postponement of the film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. It was initially set for May 7, 2021, with No Way Home set for July 16, 2021.
In the meantime, the pandemic has caused Marvel and Sony to push back their films, to the point that Doctor Strange 2, which required a lot of reshoots, moved to 2022, where Spider-Man remained in 2021. And for the writers of the scenario, it took a lot of adaptation and drastic changes in the story, as McKenna tells Variety :
Sony Pictures
We were working on the events of Doctor Strange 2, and trying to fit them into our storyline. When we started to write [Strange] knew straight away the risks of the multiverse when you do anything with it.
Then we changed that so that he was ultimately someone who didn’t know that much about the multiverse.
This is why in No Way Home, some fans quirked that Doctor Strange was behaving quite oddly and a little recklessly for someone who had been precise and very thoughtful during the events of Avengers: Infinity War and From Avengers: Endgame: He’s been made ignorant enough of the Multiverse so that it doesn’t hurt Multiverse of Madness.
McKenna continues, narratively justifying this choice, however imposed by external circumstances:
“It makes the multiverse more frightening when you start messing around with it, because you’re afraid of the unknown. [Strange] is the voice of reason: “we do not play with the fate of an individual” and Peter, the naive, says to himself “and why not? Why could not we save these people?”
Marvel studios
Benedict Cumberbatch in “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness”
The fact that Spider-Man’s Master of the Mystical Arts was changed by the Doctor Strange 2 release date may also explain why it took six weeks of reshoots to complete Multiverse of Madness. Because if Strange 2 influenced the events of No Way Home, Strange now arrives in his own film with a little more knowledge around the dangers of the multiverse.
Doctor Strange 2 is scheduled for May 4, 2022 directed by Sam Raimi, as for Spider-Man No Way Home, it is still showing at the time of this writing.