There’s been a lot of speculation about Marvel’s movie plans now that nearly all their major characters have had, or will have, a movie. New owners Disney obviously want to capitalise on the characters they paid $4 billion for, but will general audiences respond to comic creations they know little about? The success of Iron Man suggests yes, but it’s still a risk to take a smaller character and give them a mega-budget movie.
Recently there was speculation that Marvel might test out the likes of Luke Cage, Dr Strange and Black Panther in short films attached to their feature-length movies, which would essentially be tests to see if audiences respond to the character. If they did, Marvel would put a feature film into production.
However it seems that at the moment the plan is still to launch some of these characters straight into their own movie, as Deadline reports that Marvel has hired Thomas Dean Donnelly and Joshua Openheimer, the guys who wrote the script for the upcoming Conan reboot, to come up with a screenplay for a Dr. Strange movie.
In case you don’t know, the character, originated by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in 1962, is a surgeon who loses his skills in a car crash. He then visits a healer in the Himalayas in the hope of finding a cure, and after proving himself, he’s taught all the ancient mystical arts and becomes a powerful sorceror. With his new powers, Strange sets out defeat villainous magicians and other bad guys, using his mind as his main weapon rather than force.
It’s certainly not the first time a Dr. Strange movie has been mooted, with numerous studios and the likes of Bob Gale, Wes Craven, David Goyer, Stephen Norrington and Guillermo del Toro attached at various times. Now Marvel has brought it back into the fold and is hoping to finally get it to the big screen.