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

4. Doctor Strange: Hollywood Hot Potato

Doctor Strange Multiverse of Madness
Marvel Studios

In the years after Craven's involvement, Doctor Strange struggled to find a long-term home with a movie studio, bouncing between countless different companies, writers, and directors for the rest of the 1990s.

By 1995, future Batman Begins and Man of Steel scribe David S. Goyer had finished a Doctor Strange script for Columbia Pictures, but this project "didn't go very well", according to Goyer himself in a 2001 interview. In 1997, Columbia was at it again, tasking Happy Gilmore and The Cable Guy producers Brillstein-Grey with overseeing a Jeff Welch script, but this again went nowhere.

In 2000, Columbia dropped Doctor Strange altogether - a little odd, considering that the studio had Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire's first Spider-Man movie in the pipeline - while Blade director Stephen Norrington was said to be interested in the project.

Then, Goyer re-joined the project in 2001 at Dimension Films, left again in 2002 (after Dimension lost the rights to Miramax), and in 2004, Marvel Studios CEO Avi Arad stated that "we are nowhere" with a Doctor Strange movie.

You don't say!

Fortunately, the Doctor Strange film started to find more secure footing in the mid-2000s, right as the Marvel Cinematic Universe was beginning to take shape.

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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!