Superhero movies don’t come cheap, to the extent nobody bats an eyelid when a comic book adaptation racks up a tab of $200 million, but it turns out that Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness cost substantially more than that.
Of course, that shouldn’t really come as much of a surprise when Sam Raimi’s reality-bending blockbuster was stricken by the pandemic, leading to extensive delays and even more extensive reshoots. It still managed to turn a tidy profit for Disney and Marvel Studios after netting $955 million at the box office, but the Mouse House will be glad it didn’t land this year.
A report by Forbes reveals that Multiverse of Madness was a lot costlier than first believed, with the budget soaring north of $300 million before tax breaks brought it down to “only” $295 million. That’s about the same as Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny – which is in real danger of going down as an all-time bomb – so everyone will be happy it got out before Disney’s rotten run started.
Having sat by and watched the likes of Lightyear, Strange World, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, The Little Mermaid, Elemental, and Dial of Destiny all under-perform in terms of ticket sales, the bean-counters must be wistfully gazing back at the halcyon days of 2022 when its projects could actually make money from theaters.
That’s not to say Multiverse of Madness would have suffered had it landed in 2023 instead, but the evidence is certainly there to suggest that it might.