MCU: 10 Fascinating Facts Behind Doctor Strange (2016)
The Doctor will see you now.
By the time the MCU had reached Doctor Strange in 2016, its fourteenth film, it was at a bit of a crossroads.
It was three phases deep into its cinematic universe and realizing that audiences weren't as drawn to the standard origin or solo films anymore. Instead, their most recent releases were films like Captain America: Civil War or the upcoming release of Thor: Ragnarok, films that paired up multiple characters to make even the individual films feel like big event releases.
So the question became; how does one make a Doctor Strange solo film an event for audiences? For Marvel, the answer was to make a film that was distinctly different from anything they had ever done before. Doctor Strange is a mind-bending, psychedelic trip of a film that had quite the long road to production. Between various creative teams coming in and out, searching for its star, and even getting last-minute rewrites done, it was no easy task for Marvel to bring the Sorcerer Supreme to the big screen at last.
As we head towards Avengers: Endgame, we're looking back and this time it's at Doctor Strange...
10. The Visuals Were Inspired By Classic Disney Animation
Doctor Strange marked a big stepping stone for the MCU, as it was the first film to introduce the concepts of both magic and alternate dimensions. In doing so, it also had to have a look and feel that was completely unlike anything else that had come before it. Or at least, that’s how cinematographer Ben Davis saw it.
Davis was no stranger to the MCU at this point, having already worked on films such as Guardians of the Galaxy and Age of Ultron, but still had to earn the job once again on Doctor Strange. Turns out that the way he got the job was by referencing some classic Disney animation. As Davis recalls it;
“I described it, I think, when I was talking to Marvel as Marvel’s Fantasia, in a way, because it’s so sort of out there and different to everything else that they’ve done.”
Davis viewed Walt Disney’s seminal classic Fantasia as a key reference point both in terms of design and color for the film’s more psychedelic sequences, giving them their now-iconic appearance