In 2008, Marvel Studios began to blur the line between movies and comic books with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Nick Fury’s cameo in Iron Man promised to bring together characters from previously disconnected films into a single saga driven by a shared continuity. And it worked! The MCU has legions of fans, from comic book veterans to total newcomers, and it consistently rakes in billions at the box office.
However, with the MCU now in its second decade, its treatment of cinematic continuity has become rote. Worse, with the advent of the Disney+ video streaming service, the original goal of turning movies and comics into each other has mutated into something more cynical. No longer satisfied with just bringing individual movies together under a shared umbrella, the MCU asks audiences to keep track of entire exhausting content ecosystems in theaters and on streaming, even if it hurts the content itself. There’s just so much, and it all "matters"...so nothing matters.
Strange Daze
I don’t really like the first Doctor Strange movie. The painfully forced Iron Man-style humor doesn't work, and Benedict Cumberbatch’s delivery makes it worse. All the ways the film tries to sidestep the franchise’s baked-in Orientalism feel awkward and uncomfortable, too. Equating magic with science always makes my eyes roll. The frantic pacing makes it tough to appreciate the genuinely impressive visual ideas and inventive action beats. And, despite being helmed by horror director Scott Derrickson, it’s not scary, it's formulaic. Still, you can watch the flick by itself, and it makes sense. Aside from the post-credits tease and offhand mentions of “Avengers” and “Infinity Stones,” you might not even know Strange was a Marvel character until he popped up in the next big crossover. Doctor Strange is its own movie.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is also a movie. As a critic, I reject the idea of saying something "doesn’t count" just because I don’t like it. MCU movies may be bad art, but they're still art. And in many ways, Multiverse of Madness is an improvement. It’s directed by Sam Raimi, of all people. It has elements of the schlock horror-comedy he brought to Evil Dead (now a video game) with the faintest hints of the sincere heroism he expertly explored in his Spider-Man films. Plus, Raimi knows where to put a camera.
However, while the second Doctor Strange is a movie, it's not its own movie. Whatever charm Raimi manages to smuggle into the work is undone by the crushing weight of relying on external sources for the film to make sense.
This is why Multiverse of Madness is best experienced not as a movie in theaters, but as a piece of content streaming on Disney+, starting June 22. On streaming, you can watch it back to back with everything else you need to watch—all the extra information and outside context—to understand its basic plot points. With streaming, you get all the extremely necessary backstory from WandaVision (and ignore the wishy-washy stance on Wanda’s villainy). You can brush up on the multiverse-fracturing that happened in Loki. Disney+ even has that terrible Inhumans show that nonetheless earned an inexplicable Black Bolt cameo in Multiverse of Madness. (Get Anson Mount’s agent a raise.) Oh, and remember that this all takes place after the five-year, death-and-rebirth time skip from Avengers: Endgame.
