A character with as much potential for trippy weirdness as Marvel’s Doctor Strange needs to be in the hands of a very specific kind of writer. He’s a neurosurgeon who injured his hands and became a crazy wizard, after all. Give him to the wrong writer and we’ll end up with an NBC-style medical drama about a bad boy doctor who secretly uses magic to heal people. Give him to the proper writer, however, and we could get a Marvel movie so insane it makes Thor’s rainbow bridge look like some kind of bridge that isn’t made of rainbows.
As revealed by Deadline, Marvel has hired Jon Spaihts to write its Doctor Strange movie, and while it’s too early to say which of those camps he’ll fall in, we at least know he has some experience adapting a beloved genre classic into a modern blockbuster movie. Spaihts, after all, wrote a draft of the Prometheus screenplay. While that movie might not be as highly regarded as Alien, it certainly had plenty of detached pontificating about big, abstract concepts, which is totally the sort of thing a guy who calls himself the Sorcerer Supreme would do.
We previously reported that Spaihts had also been hired to write Disney’s The Black Hole reboot, which means the mouse company must see good things in him if it’s also willing to hire him for one of Marvel’s movies. That’s probably a good sign for both.
That Deadline article also provides an update on Marvel’s supposed “short list” for who will play Doctor Strange himself, with obvious names like Tom Hardy and Benedict Cumberbatch joining a less-predictable Jared Leto. We’ll just be over here saying “Aidan Gillen” over and over again, though, in hopes that someone from Disney is inexplicably paying attention. Aidan Gillen. Aidan Gillen.