1. The Journey To The Big Screen Has Been A Long One
Much like when Guardians Of The Galaxy was announced, the general public's reaction to the confirmation of a Doctor Strange film was "who?" The Sorcerer Supreme seems like an odd choice for a solo movie, considering how little is known about him and how different he is from every other member of the Marvel Cinematic Universe so far. The thing is, this isn't such a left-turn for the studio - there's been Doctor Strange adaptations in the works for years, if not decades. It's just recently they've been looking for actors you'd actually want to see. Back in the seventies there was a TV Dr Strange movie starring, erm, a bunch of people with fairly blank IMDb pages. The first big push for a cinematic debut for Stephen came in the eighties when a film scripted by Back To The Future's Bob Gale went into pre-production, but nothing ever materialised; horror maven Wes Craven was hired to direct a similarly doomed adaptation in 1992; David Goyer, who wrote 50% of the superhero films in existence, gave it a crack in 1995; Blade's Stephen Norrington got closest in 2000; most excitingly, Guillermo del Toro and Neil Gaiman almost teamed up to make a movie in 2008. If you're impatient to see what a Doctor Strange film will look like you could always check out 1992's Doctor Morbid, which began as a Strange movie before the producers lost the rights. They carried on regardless and made a weird, bootleg, off-brand Sorcerer Supreme flick starring Re-Animator's Jeffrey Combs. Here's hoping Scott Derrickson manages something less...cheap.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
