Sam Raimi brought the wall-crawler to the big screen for the first time in 2002's Spider-Man, and he's now set to return to the Marvel Universe to put his spin on Doctor Strange. As the title suggests, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness will pick up where Loki and Spider-Man: No Way Home leave off by taking the Sorcerer Supreme on a trip to any number of alternate realities.
Making these two movies at the same time wasn't lost on Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige, especially as the next Spider-Man film will bring back some of the classic villains from Raimi's trilogy. That and the Multiverse ensure the two movies are closely linked, and Feige - who served as a producer on the web-slinger's early adventures - found the whole thing pretty spectacular.
"It's absolutely surreal to be working on a Doctor Strange movie with Sam Raimi in one part of the office, and then working on a Spider-Man movie with Jon Watts and Alfred Molina as Doc Ock in another room," he revealed during a recent interview with Empire. "That has been a mind-blowing part of the last 10 years of my life."
"Everything we do at Marvel is based on a small group of people sitting around a table going, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if...?’,” he continues. "The Multiverse was always a part of that because it’s such a big part of the story in the comics."
The Multiverse is definitely something the MCU appears to be embracing as we head deeper into Phase 4, and these movies look set to make great use of the concept. Plus, seeing as Raimi succeeded in the mammoth task of bringing Spider-Man to the big screen in the early 2000s, it's fair to say he feels like the right pick to take Doctor Strange (another Marvel character we know he loves) on this journey.
For many fans, the biggest question right now is whether he reunited with Tobey Maguire so that Strange can cross paths with him while racing after the Scarlet Witch through the Marvel Multiverse...