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Well, despite the Ant-Man problem, Marvel Studios is moving ahead with a Doctor Strange movie, long rumored, and said by studio head Kevin Feige to be HIS dream super hero. A director has been tapped, Scott Derrickson, director of Sinister among other things.

Derrickson has been a rising star that Hollywood has been chasing for their big projects after the success of his horror pic “The Exorcism of Emily Rose,” which earned $144 million at the worldwide box office.

He followed that up with another horror pic, “Sinister,” which overperformed at the box office and helped gained the attention of Hollywood. With execs always looking for directors that can pull the most out of their budgets, Derrickson is a very attractive talent, with both “Sinister” and “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” costing less than $20 million but bringing in more than double that in profits.

I am super in favor of a Doctor Strange movie that looks like the art at the top of this post. Derrickson, while a hot property for his horror-tinged films, also fits the bill for the kind of directors that Marvel is most comfortable working with: the kind of guy you meet at a party and who says he’s a filmmaker and he’s repped by WME and he has this thing in development, and then a few years later he has a film out and that’s great, then you see him at that barbecue and once you nearly ran over him when you were pulling out of The Grove when he was coming out of Starbucks. You know, that kind of guy. Probably best if they stick with this type.

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9 COMMENTS

  1. Exorcism of Emily Rose – pretty good
    Sinister, The Day The Earth Stood Still – awful

    I’m sadly a bit leery.

  2. Interesting. Haven’t seen any of Derrickson’s work so I can’t really lend much of an opinion. Still, this seems very apropos of the Wright discussion from the previous post. So Derrickson is the kind of guy who can work comfortably with a big studio without pushing the vision of the movie too far out of the wheelhouse. Fair enough.

    Nonetheless, this would seem to suggest Marvel’s intention of taking the Dr. Strange movie in a fairly different direction: a superhero movie with a horror aesthetic. Will the end result stand out from the rest of the studio’s output or will Marvel’s studio-brand aesthetic take over and turn this into just another superhero movie with a half-hearted horror veneer?

  3. There will be a Doctor Strange movie and Scott Derrickson will direct it
    >>
    @Heidi :
    If recent Ant Man stuff shows us anything it is nobody “WILL DIRECT” until it is shooting.

  4. Interesting, a story about a comic book based movie that not only fails to mention the creator of the character, but uses a graphic where said creator’s name has been deliberately edited out.

  5. How ’bout that rumour of Jared Leto as Strange?

    (…and then somewhere an error was made, and Jared Harris ended up donning the cape…)

  6. “a superhero movie with a horror aesthetic” sounds like the ‘Blade’ movies, especially the first one.

    Betting on any aspects of this project would be a fool’s game. Except for the movie having NO resemblance to Ditko artwork — I’d take that bet. (Oh, and that they already have a black leather jumpsuit designed for Strange’s costume. That’s another safe bet.)

  7. BobH — If those behind the film distance themselves from Ditko and the spirit and essence of his early iconic, stage-setting appearances of Dr. Strange, they will be making an enormous mistake. Ditko created something totally different, and totally unique, and they need to capture that.

  8. Doctor Strange would make a far better TV series. You could even structure it like Arrow with Strange fighting the forces of evil in the present day and flashbacks to his life as an unreconstructed bastard before his injury and quest for the Ancient One, with moral themes connecting both plot lines.

    Mike

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