‘Doctor Strange’ Described as ‘Marvel’s Fantasia’

Marvel has given us a little taste of weirdness with Guardians of the Galaxy and the Quantum Realm stuff in Ant-Man — but things are about to get real strange when Doctor Strange hits theaters next fall. How strange, exactly? New descriptions of the film’s tone as well as the first reactions to concept art have trickled in, and we don’t think it’ll be much longer before we get a peek at some of this stuff for ourselves (cough, D23).

Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers: Age of Ultron cinematographer Ben Davis spoke to Screen Daily, where he confirms that he’ll be the director of photography on Doctor Strange. Although he obviously couldn’t reveal much, he did talk a bit about the film’s overall tone — and it does sound wonderfully weird:

It has a very psychedelic grounding, and it’s not your typical Marvel action movie. Most of the work within it is about other dimensions. And I described it, I think, when I was talking to Marvel as Marvel’s Fantasia, in a way, because it’s so sort of out there and different to everything else that they’ve done.
There’s a lot of previsualisation, and there’s a lot of work which is very hard – you look at it and you see the imagery that they’ve created for it and you think, ‘well how the hell do we shoot that!?’ because it’s all sort of Escher stuff.
It’s all very out there. I can’t really say much more about it, I’m afraid. But I think it’ll be really interesting, and it’s a very dark movie, I’m pleased to say. DP’s always love the word ‘dark’. The trouble is that most producers don’t like dark. Mostly you get into DI [Digital Intermediate process] and people don’t seem to like dark anymore!

We don’t know much about Marvel’s plans for the adaptation — Benedict Cumberbatch has been cast as the Sorcerer Supreme, aka Stephen Strange, a skilled neurosurgeon who discovers the art of magic and harnesses that power for his new persona as Earth’s number one defense against dark, mystical forces.

Disney’s African division showed off some concept art from the film a few days ago, with HTXT.Africa giving us an idea about Cumberbatch’s appearance:

Doctor Strange looks dark. Very dark. As in scraping the edge of ‘horror-movie-dark’ and information imparted about the film from Marvel Studios head, Kevin Feige, supports this appraisal. According to Feige, the film will have a firm footing in the shadowy world of the occult and supernatural. While we’re not expecting it to be a true blue horror film, but if it could provide as many chills as say Constantine (the TV series, NOT the film), then that would be great. Oh, and Benedict Cumberbatch looks very fetching in his Doctor Strange get-up. Very fetching indeed…

Tweets from others who attended the presentation (via Blastr) confirm that Cumberbatch will sport the character’s signature goatee, while one person referred to his appearance as “menacing.”

We expect to learn more about Doctor Strange this month at D23. The film hits theaters on November 4, 2016.