Scott Derrickson will return to the world of the mystic arts. The director of “Sinister” (2012), and “Deliver Us From Evil” (2014), as well as the MCU film “Doctor Strange” (2016) has been tapped by Marvel to return for the sequel. Benedict Cumberbatch will return as Stephen Strange as will Benedict Wong, who plays the Doctor’s right-hand mystical partner, Wong. Rachel McAdams who played Strange’s love interest Christine Palmer, is expected to return as well.
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No storylines or villains have been chosen because it’s very early days. No writer has been hired for the project, but that’s not to say Kevin Feige and Marvel haven’t internally figured out a direction.
The Hollywood Reporter says the plan for the movie is a script to be finished in 2019, a tentative spring 2020 production start and if all goes well, the film will land in theaters May 2021. That would make “Doctor Strange 2” to be the first Marvel sequel to arrive five years after its predecessor.
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Doctor Strange appeared most recently in “Avengers: Infinity War,” and while the character “died” at the end of the movie, *spoiler!*, the character’s vision of the future is expected to be a major plot point of “Avengers: Endgame” in April, 2019 that will see his eventually return (no superhero character really do stay dead now, do they). Unlike other Marvel films, the company seems to have taken their time with the sequel and not rushed it. Doctor Strange ended with Karl Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor) turning bad guy against the abuse of magic powers—a code he believes Strange had broken—and teased him as the villain of the next picture, but it remains to be seen whether he’ll appear or not.
“Doctor Strange” grossed $677.7 million in 2016, the 11th highest grossing movie of the year, but the second lowest grossing major superhero movie of the year behind “X-Men: Apocalypse.” [THR]