Gaiman and Del Toro’s Rejected Doctor Strange Movie Details Disclosed

The Sandman creator Neil Gaiman reveals details about a Doctor Strange film that he and The Shape of Water director Guillermo Del Toro pitched to Kevin Feige in 2007. This was even before the introduction of Iron Man, the MCU’s first hero.

Neil Gaiman, whose DC Comics character The Sandman was adapted into the new fantasy TV series on Netflix recently, has been a big fan of fictional worlds, whether it be mythology or superheroes.

Gaiman recently spoke about a pitch that he had made to Marvel Studios’ Kevin Feige about his “1602” universe to be turned into a movie/show and that it was rejected. But the SDCC 2022 Marvel Panel revealed that the upcoming What If Season 2 will feature an episode based on Gaiman’s 1602 comic.

After his recent 1602 pitch resurfaced, Gaiman pulled a throwback to speak about another pitch that Feige had rejected in 2007, before the MCU’s introduction in 2008. 

In the “Happy, Sad, Confused” podcast with Josh Horowitz (via The Direct), Neil Gaiman shared that he and the Hellboy director had pitched an idea together to Kevin Feige about the Marvel Comics character Doctor Strange. 

He also mentioned that Feige rejected the idea and would rather “concentrate on the core characters” like Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America, and Thor.

I remember back in 2007, having minimalistic conversations with Kevin Feige about “What about Doctor Strange?” Then talking to Guillermo Del Toro, and Guillermo and I had these ideas about Doctor Strange, and starting the beginning, I started the conversation with Kevin about “I could do Doctor Strange with Guillermo.” And basically, they said, “We just want to concentrate on the core characters right now. Doctor Strange is way up the line, and we don’t want to go there.”

When asked to share the details about the rejected pitch, Gaiman talked about their Doctor Strange set in the time of 1920s or 30s with the influence of Steve Ditko inspiring the plot.

There were some cool things in it. My favorite Doctor Strange thing was the idea of…the one thing that we wanted to do was have his adventures, have him become an alcoholic and a disbarred physician, all that sort of stuff, happen in the 1920s. 

The writer went into heavy details about how the change in the time period would be interesting to see when it comes to Doctor Strange, who is no stranger to timelines and multiversal travel.

The idea is that he went through all 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 notices. We just sort of liked that idea, and he would have been out of time. But other than that, it would have just been very sort of Steve Ditko because, you know, that’s the best.

Doctor Strange, as we know, was later put into development, but the movie was only realized in 2016 due to intricate story details and CGI, a war that the MCU has been fighting for a long time.

What would have been the outlook of Doctor Strange in the MCU if Gaiman and Del Toro’s collaboration had actually borne fruit? I guess that answer lies in another universe, one where Doctor Strange might still have the chance to go through.

Source: TheDirect