“Doctor Strange 2″: How did Marvel convince Sam Raimi to return to superheroes after “Spider-Man 3″?

After 15 years of absence, the director sam raimi returns to the superhero genre with the movie “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness”, to be released this May 5 in theaters in Peru and Latin America.

This return is a huge win for the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), as it was Raimi who brought superhero movies into modernity with the influential “Spider-Man” trilogy. Despite this, for many that the veteran filmmaker would venture back into the genre was something as remote as the infinitesimal possibilities that Stephen Strange saw when he searched for the futures where the Avengers defeated Thanos.

What drove this filmmaker away from the genre he reinvigorated, and how did Marvel Studios lure him back into the ring? In this note we will review it.

caught in the web

Known for franchises such as “Evil Dead” and the cult movie “Darkman”, Sam Raimi surprised the world when in 2002 he trained “Spider-Man”, starring Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst, to the acclaim of the public and critics. .

Back then, superhero movies were on a resurgence thanks to films like “Blade” (1999) and “X-Men” (2000), special effects and action shows that showed great potential at the box office. Raimi didn’t leave this behind with his film, but he also placed equal emphasis on the human aspect beneath the mask, completing the formula that would be used for decades to come and that he refined with “Spider-Man 2,” widely considered by many – including who writes – as the best superhero movie to date.

Unfortunately for the director, the third in the franchise was a disaster. “Spider-Man 3″ is an uneven film, where Sony Pictures’ decision to include three villains – Sandman (Haden Church), Green Goblin II (James Franco) and Venom (Topher Grace) – took away the opportunity to all of having a development like the one experienced by the first Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe) and Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina) in the previous installments.

Peter Parker also undergoes an unnecessary regression of the maturation of his character, who under the influence of the Venom symbiote loses sight of all the lessons learned in the last two films and becomes a parody of himself that now persists as a meme in the Internet.

It was this tepid reception that led Sony to finally decide to cancel the sequels of the saga despite being a financial success and approve the production of “The Amazing Spider-Man” (2012) by Marc Webber, a disaster whose story deserves another note.

On the reasons for the failure of “Spider-Man 3″, Sam Raimi has spoken little, but has hinted at the reasons why the tape did not succeed, in particular blaming the lack of creative control he had in the third part of the trilogy.

“Actually, they gave me enormous control over the first two films. But there were different opinions about the third film and I didn’t really have creative control, so to speak.”, he told Empire magazine in 2009.

Raimi has not exonerated himself, telling Nerdist in 2014 that the tape was “a movie that just didn’t do very well. I tried to make it work, but I didn’t really believe in all the characters, and you can’t hide that from people who love Spider-Man.”, he reflected. “If the director doesn’t love something, it’s wrong for him to do it when there are so many people who love him.”

a strange multiverse

Losing the franchise he helped popularize wasn’t the only fallout Sam Raimi suffered from the flop of “Spider-Man 3,” and the filmmaker has occasionally commented on how fan backlash led him to almost not agree to direct “Doctor Strange.” and the Multiverse of Madness”.

“I didn’t know if I could face it again because it was so horrible to have been the director of ‘Spider-Man 3’. The internet was already churning and people who didn’t like that movie had no qualms about telling me. So it was hard to take”, he confessed to Collider.

In the end, it was the promise of a challenge that encouraged Raimi to step forward.

“I learned that Marvel was in a bind, that their director, Scott Derrickson, had dropped out due to creative differences, they needed to shoot immediately, and that the script needed work.”, Said the director in an interview with AMC. “And that is the type of work that I like, with challenges. I thought it would be very interesting. So I wondered how making movies of that size had changed since I last embarked on one in 2013.”

It should be noted that “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” is the perfect film for Raimi to return to the industry, as it combines the two genres that made him famous: horror and superheroes. And a great advantage of having been involved in the project is that the filmmaker seems ready and recharged to make more films of this type. It is so recently told to Indiewire what “he would love to come back to tell another story (at Marvel).”

But perhaps the best news about it is that the director did not rule out producing a new “Spider-Man” movie starring Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunstwhich could serve as a vindication of his work a decade and a half later.

“I love Toby. I love Kirsten Dunst. I believe that everything is possibleRaimi pointed out. “I don’t really have a story or a plan. I don’t know if Marvel would be interested in that right now. I don’t know what they think about it. I haven’t really pursued that. but it sounds beautiful”.