Kevin Feige Says ‘Doctor Strange 2’ Isn’t Quite a Horror Movie; Teases Surprising New Characters

The long-speculated Doctor Strange sequel Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was confirmed at San Diego Comic-Con 2019, and if there’s one thing everybody immediately agreed on, it’s that is without a doubt the best dang title in the MCU. And it turns out Kevin Feige himself agrees; the MCU chief sat down for an extended NYFA Q&A, where he praised the film as having “the greatest title we’ve ever come up with” and teased what we can expect from the Phase 4 sequel.

One clarification the filmmaker made up top was that Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness isn’t exactly a horror movie, but as he and director Scott Derrickson teased at SDCC, it will be scary. “I wouldn’t necessarily say that’s a horror film, but it is, as Scott Derrickson, our director, has pitched it, it’ll be a big MCU film with scary sequences in it.”

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“The way, when I was a kid in the 80s, Spielberg did an amazing job,” he continued. “I mean, there are horrifying sequences in Raiders that I as a little kid would [covers his eyes] when their faces melted. Or Temple of Doom, of course, or Gremlins, or Poltergeist. These are the movies that invented the PG-13 rating, by the way.”

“It’s fun to be scared in that way, and not a horrific, torturous way,’ Feige said, “but a way that is legitimately scary, because Scott Derrickson is quite good at that, but scary in the service of an exhilarating emotion.”

Derrickson, of course, is no stranger to the horror genre, having directed horror hits like The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Insidious, and as he said when the project was announced, he’s excited to bring some scares to the MCU. ““If I’m gonna do it,” Derrickson said at SDCC. “it has to go into the territory that drew me into the Doctor Strange comics in the first place, which is how they dipped into the gothic and the horror and the horrific, and we’re going to make the first scary MCU film.”

In addition to clarifying the genre elements in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Feige also teased some surprising new character additions for the sequel during his NYFA talk.

“The next Doctor Strange film, for instance, features some new MCU characters which will be making their debut in that movie you won’t expect or won’t guess who it is,” he said, “but we found a cool way to make it work because we want to make a particular type of movie there and there was a character who we always wanted to do something with who will fit really well there.”

Of course, we do know that one of the new characters joining Benedict Cumberbatch‘s Sorcerer Supreme will be Elizabeth Olsen‘s Scarlett Witch, which was also revealed during the SDCC panel. Her arrival will tie directly into the events of WandaVision, which means between the MCU movies and their new series on Disney+, there are plenty of characters who could make their way into the fray between now and then.

By Haleigh Foutch/collider