10 Recent Movies That Put INSANE Effort Into Scenes

10. All The Illuminati Actors Were Shot Separately - Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness

No matter what you make of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse Of Madness, there's no denying that a clear amount of work went into assembling that unforgettable mid-film Illuminati sequence, featuring cameos from Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Captain Carter (Hayley Atwell), Captain Marvel (Lashana Lynch), Black Bolt (Anson Mount), and Reed Richards (John Krasinski).

The sequence was originally much smaller before being expanded into a more fleshed-out set-piece in reshoots, and due to both the availability of the cast and COVID-19 restrictions, the actors involved largely shot their parts separately.

As Black Bolt actor Anson Mount explained, the various cast members shot their parts alone or with stand-ins, with all the footage then being ingeniously stitched together during post-production:

"That was a very interesting shoot because my role came up in the reshoots. As you can imagine, several of the actors were quite busy. Patrick [Stewart] was not there. Chiwetel [Ejiofor] was not there. [John] Krasinski's contract wasn't even done. He wasn't there. We had actors playing those roles, knowing that they were going to either be substituting their shots or transplanting faces. I've never done anything quite like that, and I was in disbelief of how well it cut together."

That's a hell of a lot of effects and editing work compared to just... shooting the scene in a conventional manner with the cast.

But given the tricky nature of the shoot, which included several pandemic-related shutdowns that caused a planned Daniel Craig cameo to be scrapped, you can't really blame Sam Raimi and Kevin Feige for figuring it out in post.