One of the big Marvel controversies of the moment is courtesy of rumors that director Sam Raimi is being considered to direct the upcoming Marvel tentpole Avengers: Secret Wars. This on the surface should seem like great news. He directed one of the most beloved movies of all time — Spider-Man 2 — after all. But the controversy comes from his supposed (mis)handling of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and accusations that it retold the WandaVision story. But is that the case?
As soon as the rumor started, so did the back talk. For example, journalist Grace Randolph tweeted that Raimi “couldn’t even watch 9 half-hour episodes of [WandaVision].” Rude!
First of all, Raimi’s track record is incredible. Here are just a few:
- Evil Dead
- Spider-Man 2
- Army of Darkness
- Drag Me to Hell
- Poltergeist
- The Grudge
- The Quick and the Dead
You would be hard-pressed to make the argument that he couldn’t handle it. The other argument is the Doctor Strange one. There seems to be an issue with how the story was handled, with complaints centering around the script and how it basically retold WandaVision‘s story.
But this blame game omits to focus on the truth — that he didn’t write the script.
Let’s go over a few things here. Raimi was brought in to direct the movie after Scott Derrickson walked away. Derrickson wrote the original script with Jade Halley Bartlett, so Raimi had to basically try and pick up everything near the end. He decided to rebuild the whole script with Michael Waldron, who definitely read the WandaVision scripts. Here’s Waldron, via Fandomwire:
“As soon as I got brought on board, the first thing I did was read all of the WandaVision scripts because they were in the process of shooting that. And I went back and watched most of Sam’s films to try to [determine his strengths], in the same way that, if you’re going to be writing for a particular actor, you want to write towards their strengths.”
When Raimi took over, he really wanted to make the movie his own, which is understandable. But Raimi didn’t write it as he had a whole lot of other things to take care of at the same time.
“Because this production had already been going in pre-production, it was a little bit of a moving train. We had a start date already, a composer and cinematographer had been hired, and production teams were setting up in London. Offices had already been acquired. But Michael and I wanted to tell our own story, so he really ended up rewriting the entire script from scratch.”
That leaves us with a few things here: Sure, the writing suffered due to rewrites but the movie was beautifully directed and it made dump trucks of money. There’s no reason to think Raimi won’t be able to handle Secret Wars, especially if he’s doing it from the ground up and not jumping on board after another director decided to ditch it halfway.
If anything, people should be excited that King Raimi is doing the movie! You know he’s a master in his field, and he puts out a good product. To those fretting about Secret Wars‘ well-being — relax, it’s going to be fine.
Avengers: Secret Wars has a tentative release date of May 1, 2026.