The Sandman has been a huge hit on Netflix and fans are now waiting with bated breath for news on a second season. It would be a travesty for the show to end there, especially after that recent bonus episode only served to remind us what amazing potential this property has as a TV series.
Creator Neil Gaiman has written many comic books over the years, of course, and has been involved in his fair share of movies and TV shows, but what you may not know is that he pitched a Doctor Strange movie during the very early days of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In fact, it was in 2007 that he approached Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige about the hero.
"Kevin and I have spoken a few times over the years on things. I remember back in 2007, having minimalistic conversations with Kevin Feige about 'What about Doctor Strange?'" Gaiman recalls in the video below. "Then talking to Guillermo del Toro, and Guillermo and I having these ideas about Doctor Strange and starting the beginning, me starting the beginning of the conversation with Kevin about 'I could do Doctor Strange with Guillermo.'"
"Basically, they said 'We just want to concentrate on the core characters right now. Doctor Strange is way up the line, we don’t want to go there.'"
Del Toro being at the helm of a Doctor Strange movie is an enticing prospect, and it sounds like he and Gaiman had a unique approach in mind for the Sorcerer Supreme's big screen debut.
"The one thing that we really wanted to do was have his adventures, have him become an alcoholic and a disbarred physician, all that sort of stuff, happen in the 1920s," he reveals. "So the idea is that, he went through all of that and the training to become the world’s greatest magician maybe in the early ’30s, late ’20s, and he’s been living in Greenwich Village for 90 years looking the same in his place, and nobody really notices."
"We just sort of liked that idea, and he would have been sort of out of time. But other than that, it would have just been very sort of Steve Ditko, because, you know, that’s the best."
Despite being something of a departure from the comic books, this sounds like a great idea and one we'd have loved to see play out on screen. However, that first Phase of the MCU doesn't feel like a good place to tell a story as unique as this, while technological limitations could have held the character back somewhat.
How do you think this Doctor Strange movie would have compared to the version we got in 2016?