Despite Marvel’s intense secrecy, whenever it comes time to promote a new film, company president and super-producer Kevin Feige never shies away from revealing or confirming all kinds of cool things. Take his recent bout of interviews ahead of Ant-Man‘s release on July 17. While the surprisingly Mac and Me-less Paul Rudd film doesn’t directly involve Doctor Strange, it seems Birth.Death.Movies. was able to coax a few bits about the Sorcerer Supreme out of Feige.
First, there’s the matter of Stephen Strange’s (Benedict Cumberbatch) home in Greenwich Village, which is vastly different today from its ’60s counterpart. Despite the temporal distance between the two, Feige says the good Doctor will still be there:
“The Sanctum is on Bleeker Street, the modern day Bleeker Street. He will be the strangest thing walking out onto that street.”
Then, there’s the matter of the Ancient One, the Tibetan monk and mystic who trains Strange in the comics. A recent rumor pegged Tilda Swinton for the role, despite her being neither Tibetan nor male. Feige didn’t confirm her casting, necessarily, but he did talk about the role’s expansion from its comic book origins:
“As we were developing this film we looked at The Ancient One as a mantle more than a specific person. The sorcerers have been around for millennia, protecting us from things we didn’t know about until this story. There have been multiple [Ancient Ones], even if this one has been around for five hundred years, there were others. This is a mantle, and therefore felt we had leeway to cast in interesting ways.”
Keep in mind, these quotes from Feige don’t actually reveal all that much. They’re just pseudo-revelations, disconnected bits and pieces that audiences won’t know how to put together until they’re actually watching the movie in the theater. However, the Marvel president (and Birth.Death.Movies., to an extent) did get a little spoilery when the conversation turned back to Ant-Man and how it might connect to Doctor Strange.
With this in mind, be weary of possible spoilers below.
Feige opens up about a sequence towards the end of Ant-Man that, in his own words, gets a little “mind-bending”:
We send Ant-Man on a very weird, mind-bending journey at the end of Ant-Man. It was something we hadn’t seen in a shrinking movie before, but it also represents the tip of the mind-bending weirdness we’re going to do in Strange, which I think will surprise people.
Might this have something to do with the technology behind Hank Pym’s (Michael Douglas) Pym particles in the Marvel Cinematic Universe? After all, it sounds somewhat like what Feige previously described regarding the fate of Janet Van Dyne, also known as Wasp.
(Via Birth.Death.Movies.)
