News Analysis India

Tag: Multiverse

  • Doctor Strange’ remains atop box office as ‘Top Gun’ looms

    By Associated Press

    LOS ANGELES:  Doctor Strange and his multiverse got to linger a little longer atop the weekend box office as Tom Cruise and “Top Gun” wait in the wings.

    Marvel’s “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” was the top-earning film of the weekend for the third straight week, bringing in $31.6 million in 4,534 North American theaters, according to studio estimates released Sunday.

    “Downton Abbey: A New Era” made a strong opening showing for Focus Features with $16 million from 3,820 theaters, but there has been no real blockbuster competition for “Doctor Strange.”

    “This film has had a pretty wide-open marketplace,” said Paul Dergarabedian, the senior media analyst for Comscore. “This weekend really is, this is the proverbial calm before the storm.”

    That storm will come in the form of the long-awaited, and long-delayed, the release of “Top Gun: Maverick,” the sequel that arrives next week on Memorial Day weekend, 36 years after the original smash hit and cultural landmark. It flies in amid sky-high hype.

    “The marketing for this movie has really been going on for about three years,” Dergarabedian said. “That’s a pretty long runway to build up excitement.”

    Cruise had the film festival in Cannes, France, abuzz on Wednesday with a whirlwind appearance for the film’s European premiere that included a fly-over of French fighter jets and an honorary Palme d’Or award.

    “Top Gun” represents two seemingly fading phenomena — the major movie star and the big-screen-only experience, for which Cruise has been a tireless ambassador. And the industry is hoping they will help bring a more familiar summer for theaters.

    “This is going to be one of the most important Memorial Day weekends ever, considering what the stakes are,” Dergarabedian said. “We didn’t have a traditional summer movie season for two years.”

    Before the pandemic, the summer box office season generally brought in more than $4 billion annually. After an essentially non-existent 2020, the 2021 take, in a year of recovery, was $1.75 billion. This year’s crop of films, which also includes “Jurassic World Dominion” and “Thor: Love and Thunder,” could double that, Dergarabedian said.

    But while the world waits, “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” crossed the $800 million mark in global grosses, surpassing “The Batman” to become the top-grossing film of the year.

    Released by the Walt Disney Co. and directed by Sam Raimi, “ Doctor Strange 2 ” benefitted from being the first Marvel movie to follow “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” in which Benedict Cumberbatch’s sorcerer played a pivotal role.

    It also builds upon the popular Disney+ series “Wandavision” and contains a number of cameos that fans didn’t want to be spoiled.

    Holdover family films “The Bad Guys” and “Sonic the Hedgehog 2” took the third and fourth spots. Universal’s “The Bad Guys” added $6.1 million in its fifth week. “Sonic 2” earned $3.9 million in its seventh.

    Director Alex Garland’s folk horror thriller “Men” brought in $3.3 million for the production company and distributor A24.

    Meanwhile, “Everything Everywhere All At Once” is still going strong even after nine weeks in release. The A24 film picked up an additional $3.3 million, down only 6% from the previous weekend, bringing its total grosses to $47 million.

    Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.

    1. “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” $31.6 million.

    2. “Downton Abbey: A New Era,” $16 million.

    3. “The Bad Guys,” $6.1 million.

    4. “Sonic the Hedgehog 2,” $3.9 million.

    5. “Men,” $3.3 million.

    6. “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” $3.1 million.

    7. “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore,” $1.9 million.

    8. “Firestarter,” $1.9 million.

    9. “The Lost City,” $1.5 million.

    10. “The Northman,” $1 million.

  • Benedict loved challenging himself with different versions of ‘Doctor Strange’

    By IANS

    LOS ANGELES: Hollywood star Benedict Cumberbatch was “excited” to challenge himself with different versions of his Marvel character in the upcoming film ‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’.Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, he said: “I think it’s same-same, but different.”You have to get a correlation so that you know you’re watching an iteration that basically through perhaps choices or circumstance and environment has had a different outcome.””But it’s a nice sort of loop feeding into self-discovery and self-therapy for the character that we know from our universe, as to how he betters his choices or the situation. So it’s a fun thing to explore. It’s one of the paradoxes that a multiversal narrative will throw up, and I was excited by that challenge.”The Multiverse was opened in 2021’s ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’, when Doctor Strange tried to cast a spell to help Peter Parker (Tom Holland) by making people forget he was Spider-Man, but things didn’t go according to plan, reports femalefirst.co.uk. Cumberbatch has defended his character, noting he made his decision with “pretty good” intentions.He added: “He’s a human being, and I think it was a very human error. He saw Peter as a fellow foot soldier and then as a teenager going through a very formative experience of not being able to be his true self because of being exposed, and having lost a mentor, (Strange) decided to step in with a gesture of pretty good intention.”The actor stressed it wasn’t even his own character who messed up the spell, as he pointed to Peter’s impact. He explained: “I think the spell, on its own, might have been all right. Everyone forgets that Peter interrupts the spell so many times, and that’s what corrupted it. That’s what lets it in. Peter, through the ability he has with his powers, affects the spell with his words. It’s not really Strange’s mistake.”

  • Doctor Strange is Magic behind the multiverse  

    Express News Service

    The upcoming Benedict Cumberbatch-starrer Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is said to be the key to a new dimension in the celebrated Marvel Cinematic Universe. Based on the trailer, it looks like the bridge connecting the present to the future of the franchise, which is expected to take a different turn with upcoming titles. Naturally, expectations for the film are sky-high among the fans of the superhero. The trailers, replete with enchanting and wild visuals, of the film have also fuelled anticipation.

    Addressing the gorgeous visuals of the film, Cumberbatch shares, “I think already some of the clips people have seen in the trailer spots are just exquisite. You have got to travel through many different universes in a couple of sequences, which I think are going to be truly mind-blowing and will be a cause for a revolving-door audience. I think it’s really how they are held together with a lot of real-life environments and set build.”

    The actor says that the spectacular imagery of the film will challenge the imaginations of the viewer. “I love how big everyone’s imaginations get, how they somehow manage to ally with me as Strange. Also, not to mention how it would be to think about something that’s 20 stories high bearing down on him and throwing a bus at him. It’s magic. And, on the day, Strange carving that thing in half is just a big old fan with a load of people with their hair just going all over the place.

    And you think, ‘How is this going to work?’ But you just give yourself into the moment, and to see the end product is just such a transformational experience for an actor.” The actor shares that experiencing the film on the big screen is nothing short of magic and that he is equally excited to watch the film. “It’s such a transformational experience to be in something in the live-action vein of filming and then see the finished results on the big screen.

    You don’t know what film you are in until you have sat in the theatre. It’s magical, and I am really looking forward to that buzz. But, on the day, you just throw yourself into it with imagination and a childlike sense of play and let go of your self-consciousness because it’s ridiculous what you are trying to achieve or pretend to do. They make it look supremely cool in the end product. So, bring it on. I can’t wait to see it.”Doctor Strange in The Multiverse of Madness will release in theatres in English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam on May 6, 2022.