Warning: The following podcast has major spoilers about Disney/Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, in particular its epilogue.
If you’re working in the new multiverse phase of the Marvel Cinematic universe, it’s indeed a juggling act and balancing it all has been screenwriter Michael Waldron.
You can listen to our mind-blowing conversation with Waldron below:
He cut his teeth in the MCU with the Disney+/Marvel series, Loki, which set the stage for the galaxy wars which are bound to erupt under the new bad guy Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors) before tackling Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
However, there was another movie that Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness had to connect to, and that was Sony/Marvel’s Spider-Man: No Way Home which also featured Benedict Cumberbatch’s magic maestro. Waldron was already buds with No Way Home scribes Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers from their Community days together. “I used to get them coffee when I was a PA,” says Waldron.
Waldron kept in contact with the duo during the writing of Doctor Strange 2 to make sure that they weren’t stepping on each other’s toes.
“But when the release dates got swapped, that’s when it got tricky,” says Waldron.
“I spent the bulk of this movie thinking we’d be coming out before No Way Home and that we were going to be blowing the lid on the multiverse. When that shift in release dates happened, it was like the audience is going to be acclimated,” says the Emmy winning scribe of Rick and Morty, “Dr. Strange is going to have had experience with the multiverse and that has a knock-down effect on everything.”
In regards to Kang the Conqueror being MIA from Doctor Strange 2, Waldron says “to me it felt like we had the biggest best bullet in Wanda.”
“When working with Sam (Raimi), I said we should really make the decision to make Wanda the antagonist in this film,” says the scribe, “we can’t let another movie have that fun.”
“If you introduced Kang…you would have risked the movie getting overstuffed,” adds the writer.
But will Loki season 2 be all Kang, all war, all the time?
With season 2 about to shoot, Waldron tells Hero Nation: “In creating the show in the first place, the only way it’s worth doing to me is that we can find a new story to tell with this character. It felt like we had new emotional ground to cover with Loki. That’s the only way into season 2. We absolutely found that. It’s a great continuation of that story that feels different from season one and hopefully will subvert expectations.”
Waldron also talks the Doctor’s future with Rachel McAdams’ Dr. Christine Palmer, the Star Wars pic he’s currently making, and more.
Doctor Strange 2 is set to open to around $180M this weekend after an $85M Friday.