Saudi Arabia gets "banning Doctor Strange 2 for having a gay character" out of the way nice and early

We’re still nearly two weeks out from the release of Marvel’s latest cinematic offering, the Sam Raimi-directed Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness. Still, you know what they say: The early bird gets to continue to run a stridently anti-LGBTQ+ regime, and so it’s not wholly surprising to learn that Saudi Arabia has already gone ahead and gotten banning the film from arriving on its shores out of the way.

This is per THR, which notes that this is just the latest major film release that’s been banned from the country (and several others in the Gulf region) for the heinous (and depressingly literal) crime of including a gay character amongst its roster. (In this case, Xochitl Gomez’s America Chavez, a dimension-hopping hero who’s gay in Raimi’s film, just as she has been in the comics ever since being introduced back in 2011.) Homosexuality is illegal in a number of Gulf counties, leading Doctor Strange to just be the latest film banned for including even Disney-friendly amounts of LGBTQ+ content within its reels—see also Eternals, and Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, which was blocked from release across the Gulf due to the presence of a trans character.

At the risk of giving Disney—currently embroiled in its own home-grown issues with the Florida state government over its sometimes less than enthusiastic push against anti-gay representation legislation in the state—too much credit, it’s so far refused to back down when confronted with foreign governments calling for LGBTQ+ content to be removed from films, despite losing access to a number of lucrative foreign markets in the process. (Contrast with Warner Bros., which gave in to Chinese demands to cut six seconds of content confirming that Dumbledore and Grindelwald were lovers in the recent Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore.)

China, as always, will be the biggest test of the company’s willingness to stick to its guns; Disney has skipped the nation for several recent releases, including last year’s Marvel movies Black Widow, Eternals, Shang-Chi, and Spider-Man: No Way Home.