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“Of course, I guess,” Waldron revealed. “It’s easy to be seduced by the cheap laugh, the cheap cheer, whatever. But that’s never what Marvel or Sam [Raimi] were interested in. It was always about what’s right for the story, what’s right for Steven Strange, what’s right for Wanda. It was never about fan service, really. It was like, ‘If these Illuminati characters are here, they should be here because that’s who’s in the Illuminati in the comics, and that’s who would actually be in the Illuminati.’ That was our north star.”
Waldron also spoke about the challenges of condensing the comic multiverse — which can get incredibly complex in particular stories — into a single two-hour film.
“You don’t want to overwhelm the audience,” Waldron explained. “It can easily buckle under all of that. In addition to the multiverse, this is a continuation of Wanda’s story. It’s a continuation of Steven’s story. It’s not a show like Loki, where we had time to really live in these moments and explain them and slow play our explanation of all this stuff. We had to move fast. It’s about keeping it focused on the character, and trying to find the heart of it. The route that we took, I thought that the most interesting version of a multiverse story would actually be to fully invest in the reality of one alternate universe — go there, really feel like it was a real place, with real stakes and real characters and histories and everything. As opposed to what we did on Rick and Morty, which is more ‘you hop from universe to universe’, and it feels a little more fast-paced and comedic. We wanted to feel like the multiverse and the MCU, these are real places. That was what we tried to render on screen.”
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is now playing in theaters.
