Neil Gaiman and Guillermo Del Toro Were Going To Work On Doctor Strange?
Apparently, Neil Gaiman and Guillermo del Toro originally had plans to team up for a Doctor Strange movie for Marvel
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Somewhere in the multiverse, there is a Doctor Strange movie written by Neil Gaiman and directed by Oscar winner Guillermo del Toro. Unfortunately, you aren’t in that particular universe. All we can do is think about what might have been, thanks to a recent podcast interview with Gaiman, in which the Sandman creator talked about the proposed Doctor Strange film he once pitched to Marvel honcho Kevin Feige. According to Murphy’s Multiverse, the idea was shot down, and the pair went on to greater things. Gaiman gave his recollections on the lost film to Josh Horowitz of the Happy Sad Confused podcast during a live taping in New York City. His Doctor Strange comments come at about the 55-minute mark in the video below.
According to Neil Gaiman, despite having two A-list talents willing to take on the character, Marvel wasn’t interested in a Doctor Strange movie at the time. “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,'” Gaiman recalled. At the time, Marvel Studios was in the midst of production on the original Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, as they worked toward an Avengers movie, so he and Guillermo del Toro abandoned the idea.
Doctor Strange did get a great live-action big screen adaptation in 2016 from director and co-writer Scott Derrickson, with Sam Raimi helming a sequel that released earlier this year. Yet, Marvel fans would have likely flipped for the take Neil Gaiman planned for the character, which would have initially been set in the 1920s, and seeing the character become an alcoholic and a disbarred physician, only to begin his training to become the greatest magician ever.
“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,” he said. “It would have just been very sort of Steve Ditko because, you know, that’s the best.” One could only imagine the visuals Guillermo del Toro would have created, but Nightmare Alley gives us a nice idea.
In 2007, Neil Gaiman had just finished a run writing The Eternals in a seven-issue limited series drawn by John Romita Jr. for Marvel Comics. It was a well-received reboot of the classic characters created by Jack Kirby, and helped form the basis for an introduction into the Marvel Cinematic Universe last year. At the same time, Guillermo del Toro was fresh off of his critically acclaimed fantasy film Pan’s Labyrinth, which earned six Oscar nominations. It won three, most notably, Best Cinematography, and helped established the director as a true artist. Del Toro would go on to write and direct Hellboy II: The Golden Army in 2008, and Oscar wins would come via The Shape of Water a decade later. In 2009, Gaiman would see his book Coraline turned into a critically acclaimed stop-motion animated film by Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas).
Neither Neil Gaiman nor Guillermo del Toro have gotten around to doing a Marvel film, although del Toro has been rumored to be in consideration to direct a film based on one of Marvel’s darker characters, with both Ghost Rider and Man-Thing being considered. Since then, he’s been busy writing the Hobbit trilogy, winning Oscars, and prepping his latest directorial effort, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, for Netflix. Gaiman did write an Eternals/Marvel Knights animated motion comic series in 2014, but has mostly stayed busy working within the DC Comics universe, creating the 2017 TV series Lucifer, based on his Vertigo comic, and of course, his long-awaited live-action adaptation of The Sandman for Netflix. It made its debut in August to both acclaim and criticism from fans, who are decidedly split on it.
