The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been successful in large part due to the fact that it's always got an eye on the future. So what's the future for the MCU's newest hero look like? The director of Doctor Strange has some ideas. Barring the unlikely event that Doctor Strange completely bombs, we can be fairly confident that the film will have a sequel. Scott Derrickson has some ideas where another film might go, which he's borrowing from a comic book character on the other side of the fence.
What made The Dark Knight so great was that the origin story of Batman had been well-told, and then it was time to bring in a villain where you really got to go deep. And not just the Joker, also Two-Face. It was a more visceral experience, I'd love to be able to do that for Doctor Strange.
If you're going to borrow ideas for your comic book movie, you could do much worse than using The Dark Knight as a template. The film is generally regarded as the best of Christopher Nolan's trilogy, and one of the best superhero movies ever made. We can count Doctor Strange director Scott Derrickson among its fans it would seem, as he tells Den of Geek that he would love to use some of those ideas for a sequel of his own.
The idea here, it would seem, is that The Dark Knight was able to do some interesting things with its characters, specifically, its villains, because the introduction of Batman had been handled well in the original film, so the sequel didn't need to spend any additional time creating its lead character. If Doctor Strange has done an equally good job creating its lead character, then it can focus a sequel on other things. This would mean introducing new villains and potentially also other aspects of the world that could draw us deeper into Doctor Strange.
And there's certainly plenty that a Doctor Strange sequel could do. In the comics, the character routinely travels through multiple dimensions and planes of existence. While we may get some of this in the first movie when it comes out in a couple of weeks, it's likely it won't go too deep, simply because there's so much other material to cover. A sequel could introduce some pretty remarkable locations and characters once the basic structure has been built by the first film.
One of the reasons that Marvel has said that their villains have not necessarily been the strongest characters is because the focus is always on the hero and so there's less time to develop the bad guy. It seems Scott Derrickson may be willing to make that trade-off in a sequel to Doctor Strange. Are you? Let us know in the comments.
