Doctor Strange Ending Explained by Scott Derrickson

Spoilers! The director of Doctor Strange talks us through his thinking with the ending to the film, and its end credits stings...

ByJames Hunt|October 28, 2016|

|Comments count:0

Big spoilers for Doctor Strange lie ahead.

Now playing in cinemas around the UK, with a US release next week, is Marvel’s 14th feature,Doctor Strange. It’s notable for having an ending that goes slightly against the modern grain. And Den of Geek UK spoke with the film’s director, Scott Derrickson, about his thinking behind the finale (with due credit of course to his fellow writers too, C. Thomas Cargill and Jon Spaihts).

SPOILERS AHEAD.

Still here? Here we go…

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I feel like you did actually save the best sequence in the movie until the end.

Ha, yeah. People always complain that superhero movies end with a big fight scene where they’re tearing up a city, and there’s a portal opening up and they have to close it… I wanted to have a climactic scene that subverted those familiar ideas.

It meant the story wasn’t reduced to “which CGI thing can hit the other CGI thing harder” which is a problem a lot of superhero movies end up having.

Yeah, I mean if you’re gonna establish some being that exists beyond time with this awesome power, how else is he going to beat him than the way we show? And it just happens to tie in with the theme of the movie…

A lucky coincidence…

Right!

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Also, the end credit scenes. Did you direct the both?

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I directed the Mordo tag scene.

So is the first a scene fromThor: Ragnarok?

Taika [Waititi] shot that – I can’t say if it’s fromThor 3or not, but we had our set up and were going to strike it after I finished shooting and it’s a very expensive set with the chamber of relics and the window and everything… I don’t know where they were on the script process, but it was before they were in production. Taika wrote that scene and came in and shot it.

We had no specific intention at that point to use it as the tag, but after we finished our movie we felt that it was kind of perfect. It plays really well, the audience likes the uplift of Strange being introduced to the wider MCU. Until then he’s not really a part of it, he’s just a story happening on his own – but after that tag, it’s all changed.

Doctor Strange opens in the US on November 3rd.

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