It’s no Werewolf by Night, but Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness did a pretty handy job of associating the MCU‘s premier sorcerer with its spookier corners, courtesy of Sam Raimi and Elizabeth Olsen’s ability to sell a mother possessed.
And with Multiverse of Madness sending Doctor Strange off to the Dark Dimension in its mid-credits scene, it’s not hard to imagine his next appearance involving more than a few creep factors; we’re hoping that one of them takes the form of Ghost Rider, but then, we hope for just about everything with every passing Marvel release.
But if one user on r/FanTheories is correct, then Doctor Strange could be going down a path that parallels one of the most defining works of horror in the history of humanity, and the sorcerer’s encounters up until now serve as some fairly palpable receipts.
Given his reckless abandon in the last couple of projects we’ve seen, the user argues that the MCU could be preparing to adapt Jason Aaron’s comics run of Doctor Strange, in which the consequences that Doctor Strange bears after involving himself in things such as the Darkhold, for example, are instead taken off of him and put onto a being called Mr. Misery, a monster he hides in his basement. If such characterizations and relationships were to be at play, it wouldn’t be a far cry to compare Doctor Strange’s plight to that of Dr. Frankenstein, with Mr. Misery filling the role of the monster.
We’ve already seen him resurrect a zombified version of himself in Multiverse of Madness, so portraying the sorcerer in a sort of “mad doctor” light would arguably be all the more fitting for this character and his trajectory. It’s impossible to say when we’ll see him next, but we’d wager it will be in one of Marvel’s more disturbing projects, and we don’t mean disturbing in the way that Quantumania is.