Like Thor: Love and Thunder, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness had a shorter than expected runtime. It didn't hurt the movie too much, but it's become apparent that, as is so often the case, a lot of big scenes ended up being left on the cutting room floor.
That's inevitable with blockbusters like this one, but it was definitely surprising that Kamar Taj student Rintrah ended up playing such a small role in the movie. After all, he adorned more than his fair share of merchandise prior to the Doctor Strange sequel's release, and it appears there was a time when he had a big enough role to justify that.
Something changed during those reshoots, though, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness Costume Designer Graham Churchyard has now told us about a scrapped sequence with the Kamar Taj students he was said to see go.
"I'm so happy with what's there, but yeah, we did spend a lot of time on when Wong goes to Wundagore. The remaining students rally together, and because they've lost their Sling Rings, they donned cold weather gear to climb the ice wall to Wundagore to help him," Churchyard reveals in the video below. "We designed all these costumes. There were 12 students. [The] stunt doubles and stand-ins...we probably made about 50 costumes."
"Second Unit was shooting at the same time, and, unfortunately, because of the running time, that whole section was cut. They weren't high street branded Arctic explorer costumes. I made ones like Shackleton would have worn [Laughs]. I had this fantasy that they found a crate somewhere in the bottom of Kamar Taj and there's some Edwardian climbers gear in there someone like Edmund Hillary or Shackleton would have worn in the early part of the 19th century."
"They were simple because they were like canvas coggles, but they had all this leather work and these crazy mitts and keep warm stuff that you'd have had in the Edwardian period," he concluded. "That went, but what we have was just so amazing."
While it's a shame these scenes didn't make it into the movie, it would be unfair to say it suffered too much without them. Ultimately, that's probably why they weren't included in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, though it's crazy to think about how much work went into sequences we never got to see (and potentially never will).
If nothing else, more Rintrah would be welcomed, and we'd bank on him showing up either in Doctor Strange 3 or an eventual America Chavez solo outing should one happen.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is now available on Digital and will be released on 4K, Blu-ray and DVD July 26.