When you make an adaptation of a comic book property, it’s only natural that there will be a lot of Easter Eggs and callbacks to the property you’re adapting. And when you can expand off of that and include more references and character nods? You often see that happen. Which brings us to the Doctor Strange sequel that has a LOT of fan service and requests in terms of cameos, Easter Eggs, and more.
And yet, as writer Steve Waldron noted, they did it WITHOUT thinking about “fan service”:
“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.”
“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. We wanted to feel like the multiverse and the MCU, these are real places. That was what we tried to render on screen.”
An interesting version of events. Of course, not all liked that approach as many didn’t like what happened with the Illuminati, or how we only got to really see one other universe in full. Still, the movie was successful, and perhaps they can build off this in another way with the upcoming third film that’ll no doubt happen.
Source: ComicBook.com
