Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the second installment of the adventures of Steven Strange, has become the eleventh premiere of history that has worked best at the box office, with a collection of 185 million dollars during the weekend in the United States and more than 530 million accumulated globally.
To establish a close comparison, this figure almost equals what was achieved in its premieres by all the Marvel movies released in 2021, that is: Black Widow, Shang-Chi and the legend of the ten rings and Eternals, which raised about 227 million of dollars.
It is true that the comparison between the premieres of these films, in parameters of incidence and fear of going to theaters due to COVID-19, plays in favor of the Supreme Sorcerer film, but it also shows that, when it comes to playing bullets , Marvel and Disney have increasingly clear data: sequels work better than introducing characters.
Let me follow your sequel: the cases of Dr. Strange and Spider-Man
Marvel Studios This is not the first time that we at Hipertextual have talked about how cinema is, in one way or another, 'sequentializing'. Disney has been experimenting with this common thread for years, but in the last five years, with the consolidation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe —the greatest saga of sequels ever told— and its renewed commitment to making live-action remakes of their classics, confirm it.
In one way or another, it seems like a kind of positive sum between the public and studios like Disney, holders of a swarm of rights that ultimately leads to a kind of global cultural heritage. Viewers like to see characters and stories they already have a connection to and trust as a safe bet for entertainment, and studios are also more certain that it can work in theaters, especially at a time when doubts about any title —and more so in the case of Diseny— can always lead you to Disney Plus or the associated streaming platform.
As we mentioned, the so-called live-action remakes of Disney have become one more part of its usual money-making machine, since it began in 2010 with Alice in Wonderland to Mulán or Cruella.
But what Doctor Strange 2 has also shown is that story lines between studios can work much more closely together without fear of the rights barrier that existed before. The paradigmatic case is that of Disney and Sony, which controls the film rights of the Spider-Man franchise, broke with tradition and included Doctor Strange (a character controlled by Disney) as a character main in his film the last film of the wall-crawler, where the multiverse was already showing its leg in every way.
The double sequel that Doctor Strange 2 supposes
The collaboration between various studios became more apparent with the addition of Spider-Man to the Avengers movies, but in those movies Spider-Man was part of a larger ensemble of Marvel characters. The reverse collaboration, with Strange in a Sony film, is indeed differential.
Because, unlike the Avengers movies, the multiverse theme blends the Sony and Disney Marvel cinematic universes in an already indissoluble way.
In Doctor Strange 2, the events of No Way Home and Spider-Man are directly referenced. Therefore, Doctor Strange 2 is, in effect, a sequel to the first Doctor Strange film in 2016, as well as a sequel to No Way Home, even though the films are produced by entirely separate studios.
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And everything that can come ahead
Spoiler warning from this line.
Additionally, the Doctor Strange sequel also manages to (spoiler alert) intertwine characters from The Avengers, X-Men, and Fantastic Four (two titles that Disney picked up the rights to through its acquisition of 21st Century). Fox in 2019), Captain Carter (the alternate universe version of Captain America seen in What If…?), and a new Captain Marvel through Maria Rambeau, the best friend of Brie Larson's version of Captain America in the movie. Marvel.
In short, a lot of fabric to cut. But the opportunities to continue weaving together the cross-platform, format, and studio nexus and linked storylines offer Disney endless opportunities to release movies and series that continue to grow their box office and subscriber numbers.
