Doctor Strange: 22 Secrets Revealed By The Director's Commentary

6. The Scene Benedict Cumberbatch Suggested

There's a rich history of comic book movie actors ad-libbing and changing scenes with their input, and that happened in Doctor Strange. In the scene that sees the magical cloak dabbing away Doctor Strange's tears, specifically - which was a suggestion of Benedict Cumberbatch.

5. The Final Boss Fight

Derrickson talks about the giant end scene with Dormammu in terms of it being like a "boss fight" in a video game, where you have to be killed several times to win. It was also one of the only scenes to stay in he script all the way through production and scripting, remaining almost identical.

He also says the reverse-time sequence in Hong Kong was created as a riff on the way superheroes usually destroy cities at the end of Marvel movies: “In this case instead of tearing up a city I wanted to put a city back together.”

The director also talks up the importance of time as a motif to the final battle...

“I love the idea of Strange going into a dimension without time and bringing time into it. It seemed important that the ending deal with time because time was so thematically present in the movie.”

And he explains the time dynamic as it works on Dormammu:

"[He's] this big, lumbering god-like being that is trapped by time, at this point he doesn’t even get it, he doesn’t even really understand what’s happening to him because he doesn’t understand the concept of time, he doesn’t exist in a place where things age.”

And in case you missed the obvious, Derrickson confirms that the scene is designed to show Strange coming to terms with it actually not all being about him.