When Marvel finally gets around to a Doctor Strange movie, it may throw audiences right into his time as Sorcerer Supreme without going into detail on how the mystical hero got to that point in his career.
‘Deliver Us From Evil’ director Scott Derrickson’s ‘Doctor Strange’ will not be an origin story and neither will the Marvel movies following it. Faraci said this about Stephen Strange’s big screen debut:
“Doctor Strange, they had a script in house forever….It’s a pretty standard origin story for Doctor Strange, it’s got Baron von Mordo as the bad guy. That’s all gone. Marvel’s new thing is no more origin stories. It’s got Doctor Strange all ready established as The Sorcerer Supreme. It’s a totally new script. Jon Spaiths [of ‘Prometheus’] is working totally new, on his own, without any of the previous stuff. They’re not even touching the previous script…. This is not going to be 20 minutes of him as a doctor.”
Origins aren’t gone. Origin movies are gone.
Guardians of the Galaxy is a perfect example of how origins stories in superhero movies almost bog down the film’s narrative and pace. The newest Marvel movie didn’t have a traditional origin story, although it shows how the team came together, but rather gave audiences bits and pieces of Star-Lord, Gamora, Drax the Destroyer, Groot, and Rocket Raccoon’s back story as a way to propel the film’s story and action. The film’s screenwriters – James Gunn and Nicole Perlman – gave audiences enough information about its characters to justify their actions. We never saw Drax’s murdered family, or the terrible experiments performed on Rocket, or Gamora’s iffy family, but we still understood why they were doing what they’re doing.
At this point in movie-going, audiences can accept that superheroes exists in movies and move on from there. No need for handholding, if general audiences can get on board with a weird superhero movie like Guardians Of The Galaxy, then will mostly get on board with almost anything. Besides, it would get pretty boring and tedious if over the next six years, a majority of those 40 new superheroes coming up have the same structure and template. It’s time for superhero and comic book movies to evolve again into a more mature genre. Today’s movie-going audiences are smart enough to fill-in-the-blanks with a superhero’s mythology.
Specifically, in the case of Marvel, it’s the fact that the universe is so established the need for origins is becoming less necessary. I feel like the movies are happening linearly (Captain America being an exception), so any other heroes will have been well established in the fiction of the universe now. Perhaps Marvel doesn’t want to lose that momentum? Instead of wasting time they get right into it, so the teams ups will have more significance.
Does it disappoint you that we potentially won’t get to see how Stephen Strange became a master of the mystic arts? In the end, does it even matter?
-Dagobot
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Marvel doesn’t plan to repeat with phase three