A New Doctor Strange 2 Featurette Invites You To Enter The Multiverse

Sam Raimi and the cast of "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" are showing fans a peek behind the curtain in a new behind-the-scenes video ahead of the film's release. The featurette, titled "Enter the Multiverse," is in some ways a typical hyping up of the latest Marvel movie, but it also puts Raimi's universe-hopping, horror-tinged vision front and center in a way that few of the film's trailers or promos have so far.

"I wanted to give the fans what they wanted, just not exactly what they expected," Raimi says, over footage of Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) fighting Gargantos the one-eyed squid monster. The filmmaker seems super excited, and he should be. His history in both the superhero ("Spider-Man") and the horror genres ("The Evil Dead") makes him a great fit for this trippy-looking film, and the footage spliced together in the featurette highlights exactly how weird the multiverse may get. We're shown familiar glimpses of a dark variation of Strange, a multi-armed figure, and a mummy-like entity, among other inter-universe terrors.

The cast of "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" appears in the featurette as well, promoting the movie as one of the biggest things Marvel's ever done. "It's the most fantastic new phase of Marvel," Cumberbatch says, and that grand claim is pretty in line with his previous assertion that the movie will be "Spider-Man: No Way Home" level massive. Raimi credits Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) and Strange as the reason the project has such appeal, calling the movie "a great opportunity to pair two of the most powerful superheroes together."

As sorcerer and knowledge keeper Wong, Benedict Wong also seems to have a major part to play in the action this time around. The actor doesn't give anything away about his character here, but does say that "audiences are going to be startled by these other realities" on display in the movie. Olsen adds that "unlocking the multiverse creates a big Pandora's box."

Even more so than the recent Spider-Man film, "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" seems like the perfect chance to bring the multiplicity of the Marvel comics–which are constantly changing depending on the arc, era, and author–to life. Just as the "What If...?" animated series on Disney+ last year was able to present alternate versions of the Marvel canon, this featurette shows that "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" doesn't seem beholden to the previous limits of the MCU. That makes it all the more exciting.

"Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" premieres in theaters on May 6, 2022.