How Marvel Foreshadowed Doctor Strange's Arrival In The MCU

As anyone who's paid much attention to Kevin Feige over the last decade or so will already know, the plans to bring Doctor Strange to the MCU were in progress well before Benedict Cumberbatch signed on.

The Marvel Studios supremo had been as enthusiastic about bringing the Sorceror Supreme to the big screen as fans had been to see him and that enthusiasm was reflected in the little teases dropped into other MCU movies as far back as Phase One.

And it started well before even that...

3. The Long Production Plans

Initially, Marvel had announced that Strange would be one of the first characters to get a MCU movie - way back in 2005 - with Captain America planned as the other tentpole release to launch Marvel Studios' independently produced movies. This came after various productions had been in some form of activity since Bob Gale wrote a script back in 1986.

Ultimately, the film proved to be difficult to write and by 2009 - four years after a budget had been set and after Marvel had pivoted to using Iron Man as the primary launch point for the MCU - the studio proactively sought new writers, giving Conan The Barbarian scribes Thomas Dean Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer a chance to write it. But it wasn't until 2013 that Feige eventually announced that Doctor Strange was coming to Phase 3.

That effectively means that the film was in development for almost THIRTY years before it got off the ground properly and the release came exactly three decades after Gale's initial script. In other words, the parties invested in making Strange happen had a LOT of time to think about those plans.

And even with the uncertainty that must surely have been bred out of such little activity over such a long period of time, there was obviously confidence that a Doctor Strange movie was coming. Why else would we have had so many hints of Strange and the Sorcerors' existence before Phase 3 was even planned?

Doctor Strange was Marvel's long-game - just as much as Thanos was - and they foreshadowed the Sorceror Supreme's appearance in gentle ways, starting with Iron Man 2. In that film, the Easter Egg heavy SHIELD map that confirmed Wakanda's importance (and is often used to suggest the existence of Atlantis and Namor) had a mysterious New York marker on it. Given the revelation that SHIELD were monitoring "interesting" individuals that would come later, there's every chance that this was a marker on Strange.

But that wasn't the only Easter Egg and there were far more concrete references to come...