The True Story Behind Wes Craven's Failed Doctor Strange Movie
7. Dormammu, The Fourth Dimension, And Easter Island
It was the LA-based production company Regency Enterprises that snagged those Doctor Strange film rights in the late 1980s, with the studio believing that the Sorcerer Supreme had strong big screen potential.
Not wasting any time in getting the project going, Regency tapped British filmmaker Alex Cox to write a script. At the time, Cox was fresh off the 1984 sci-fi comedy Repo Man and the 1986 Sid Vicious biopic Sid and Nancy, and though these movies weren't monster hits, they proved that Cox was a man with vision, with style - an interesting pick for a Marvel blockbuster.
Joining Cox on scriptwriting duties was Stan Lee, the man who had actually co-created Doctor Strange in 1963. His influence lent the script an extremely fantastical, "comic-book-y" flavour, with the story kicking off with a Stonehenge-set prologue where the wizard Merlin is struck by lightning. From here, the movie journeys to contemporary New York and the Fourth Dimension, before ending with a climactic showdown - against the mighty Dormammu - on Easter Island.
The script is available online in full, and it's definitely worth flicking through.
Cox would later call Doctor Strange his "favourite superhero" and Lee a "great writing partner", so there was clearly a lot of positive buzz around this script. Obviously though, it was never actually produced - problems arose because Regency had a distribution deal with Warner Bros. at the time, and Warner Bros., simultaneously, was caught in a merchandising dispute with Marvel Comics.
This led to Regency, Lee, and Cox's Doctor Strange dreams fading away, but Strange himself did actually make the jump to the movies - just not in the way you'd expect.