The True Story Behind Wes Craven's Failed Doctor Strange Movie

6. Doctor Strange Enters The Cinematic Realm (Sort Of)

Doctor Mordrid movie
Full Moon Entertainment

With the Doctor Strange movie rights once again up for grabs, American film producer Charles Band decided to option the property. Band was known for cult horror favourites like Subspecies, Puppet Master, and Re-Animator, so a darker take on the Sorcerer Supreme was definitely on the cards here.

Band quickly set about developing the project with his company Full Moon Entertainment, but disaster struck when his license to use Doctor Strange expired, meaning that the movie could no longer go ahead. At this point, Band had two options: he could scrap all the work that had been done so far and move on to something else; or, he could take the Doctor Strange project and rework it.

He chose the latter.

The result was 1992's Doctor Mordrid, a superhero action film that, as you can probably tell from the above poster, bears many similarities to Doctor Strange. Jeffrey Combs - who had worked with Band on Re-Animator - played the title role of Anton Mordrid, a sorcerer who must stop the evil Kabal from destroying the Earth!

As early '90s B-movies go, Doctor Mordrid looks surprisingly impressive, although its scant 74-minute runtime does leave its story feeling underdeveloped. Still, it wasn't the absolute disaster its uniquely troubled production would leave you to believe.

Back to the proper Doctor Strange though, and with Band's option expired, another company landed the rights to make a Doctor Strange film - and this is where horror master Wes Craven entered the picture.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!