One hallmark of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way the movies and TV shows weave together, enhancing and strengthening each other. Some are more tightly connected than others; many can be enjoyed entirely on their own. Black Panther could be followed fairly easily without seeing Captain America: Civil War, although you'd learn even more about T'Challa in that movie. But can you really get the full effect of Avengers: Endgame without seeing most of the 22 movies that came before? Good luck with that. Show Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, a.k.a. Doctor Strange 2, isn't quite that intricate, but there are a handful of key Marvel tales that you absolutely need to understand to follow just what in the Dark Dimension is going on here. It's not just that director Sam Raimi's new movie is a richer experience with a few bonus reference points—it's that the film is probably inscrutable without them. But fear not, Casual Marvel Watcher. Here's a primer on everything you need to know to follow along. (Spoilers ahead—not for Doctor Strange 2, but for the other movies and shows that factor into it.) Spider-Man: No Way Home
Given the box office for this behemoth, it doesn't seem like many people missed Jon Watts’ blockbuster back in December. But if the details have faded a little since then, here's how it connects to Doctor Strange's realm. Tom Holland's poor Peter Parker has become a pariah, with the world convinced that Spider-Man is a terrible, awful, no-good guy who creates more problems than he solves. After saving the universe together in Avengers: Infinity War, the webslinger goes to Benedict Cumberbatch's Doctor Strange and asks him to use his Sorcerer Supreme powers to erase what people think they know about Spider-Man. But Peter keeps changing his mind during the casting of the spell, and Strange's concentration breaks—along with the fabric of the universe. This allows “other” Peter Parkers to slip through the cracks from alternate dimensions. We recognize them as characters from other Spider-Man films— Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker, Andrew Garfield's Peter Parker—making those earlier movies now official MCU canon, albeit from entirely different timelines, with different stories and experiences, and different villains (who also slip through to cause havoc). Everything gets straightened out in the end, but the ripple effects of the Multiverse began there. You should go into Doctor Strange 2 knowing that the title character has recently tangled with alt-universes. When you see Doctor Strange in this new movie, it's important to remember that it may simply be a Doctor Strange, not the Doctor Strange. What If …?
This animated Marvel series laid the foundation for how familiar heroes could have entirely different stories in other dimensions. Among the possibilities it explored were “what if Black Panther's T'Challa had been kidnapped into space and became Star-Lord instead of Guardians of the Galaxy's Peter Quill?” and “how would Marvel's heroes fare in a zombie apocalypse?” Without giving away too much, the first chapter of What If …? considers the possibility that Hayley Atwell's Agent Carter might have been the test subject for the super soldier serum instead of Steve Rogers, turning her into the British superhero Captain Carter. Another episode explores the question: “What if Doctor Strange lost his heart instead of his hands?” His “heart” in this instance is Rachel McAdams' Christine Palmer, who is killed in the car crash that—in the prime dimension we've already seen—shatters Strange's hands and ruins his surgery career, sending him on a path to seek out another cure through the mystic arts. A handful of these episodes are directly relevant to Doctor Strange 2, since he encounters a few of the alternate versions of himself and others in The Multiverse of Madness.
In the universe where Palmer dies, nothing Strange learns—no magic he conjures, no supernatural beings he absorbs into his own soul—give him the power to replay that moment in a way that spares her life. He loses Palmer again, and again, and again, which forces him to explore darker and more sinister forms of power. Nothing works. He is left inhabiting a surviving scrap of a ruined universe, brimming with evil that he has absorbed, and utterly alone. The theme of this episode is that that failing to accept loss will only lead to more loss. But this “dark” version of Doctor Strange, known as “Strange Supreme,” may turn up again … Loki
By Chuck Zlotnick/Marvel Studios. How are all these Multiverses possible? And why haven't the characters of the MCU had to deal with them before? This question is answered in the Disney+ series Loki, which has Tom Hiddleston's villain-turned-anti-hero tangling with an otherworldly bureaucracy known as the Time Variance Authority. Their job is to “prune” dimensions that deviate too far from the “sacred timeline,” which keeps everything separate and in order. “Prune” is a good word, because they're like gardeners who keep the plants from growing into each other. By the end of season one, Loki and Lady Loki (a.k.a Sylvie, a female version of the trickster god played by Sophia Di Martino) reach the “end of time” and confront a being known as He Who Remains (played by Jonathan Majors). He Who Remains is a version of a futuristic scientist who first discovered the Multiverse, and he is disturbed by the warlike alternate versions of himself, who cause widespread death and destruction by trying to conquer each other's timelines. He founds the TVA in order to suppress the rise of the alt-versions of himself. But Loki and Sylvie believe he has gone too far, and when He Who Remains is killed by Sylvie, he warns that there will no longer be anyone preventing the various timelines from running amok. So, that's now exactly what we're seeing happen in the wider MCU. ContentThis content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel, confirms that this turning point in Loki is critical exposition for the new Doctor Strange movie. “Loki and Sylvie did something at the end of that series that allowed all of this to become possible,” Feige said at the Doctor Strange 2 premiere. “He Who Remains is gone, and that allowed a spell to go wrong in Spider-Man: No Way Home, which leads to the entire Multiverse going quite mad in this.” WandaVision
Courtesy of Disney The final and perhaps most important story that sets up Doctor Strange 2 is the Disney+ series that focused on Wanda Maximoff and The Vision, in which they appear to inhabit a series of sitcom-like realities inside a small town that been consumed by a magic spell. It turns out that Elizabeth Olsen's Wanda has conjured this bizarre situation as a way of comforting herself after the death of Vision in Avengers: Infinity War. It's not an alternate universe, but rather a delusion she is creating with her powers, fueled by unfathomable grief and a childhood love for goofy TV comedies. Along with recreating Vision, she also generates two twin boys, Billy and Tommy, who become focal points for the motherly love she was never able to have in real life. When she surrenders her hex, ending the WandaVision spell over the town, the two boys also vanish. They were never real in the first place. But in a post-credit scene, we see Wanda in an isolated cabin with the text of forbidden spells known as the Darkhold. She hovers in full Scarlet Witch regalia, using the book to flip through the pages of the Multiverse. She's looking for a realm in which Billy and Tommy are actually real—and is determined to use her magic to visit this alternate dimension and claim them as her own. With this shift, the heroic Wanda slips gradually into the villainous role of her witch alter-ego. She has no idea how to go from her universe to the one where her sons are real, but that quest is central to what goes down in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
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