Nicolas Cage, Joaquin Phoenix and the Doctor Strange Movies That Never Got Made

What if Doctor Strange was played by Nicolas Cage? Or Joaquin Phoenix? What if the film was written by Back to the Future writer Bob Gale, or made as a horror film by David Goyer and Stephen Norrington, the writing and directing duo behind Blade? Or what if Guillermo del Toro had taken a crack at it?

Believe it or not, all of these things almost happened. Doctor Strange went through decades of development before it finally made it to the screen. Here is how we went from all of that to the movie we got.

Bob Gale's Doctor Strange script was surprisingly close to the 2016 film

Hot off the heels of Back to the Future, writer Bob Gale was asked if he wanted to take a crack at writing Doctor Strange. Marvel Comics had been a huge influence on him growing up. When his agent told him the studio was looking for a writer, and that Stan Lee was involved, Gale jumped at the chance.

What he came up with was surprisingly comic accurate. In some ways it was shockingly close to the Doctor Strange movie we'd eventually get decades later, with a few key differences. Gale's script opens 700 years in the past, focusing on an Ancient One and his student as they attempt to stop a tribal priest and his cult from summoning Dormammu to Earth through human sacrifice. They manage to stop the ritual, but at a cost: the master dies, passing the mantle on to his student. Dormammu vows revenge before being sucked back through the dimensional portal.

From there, the story jumps to 1980s Manhattan, and that's where the script starts to resemble the movie Marvel fans would see in 2016. In this version, Baron Mordo betrays and nearly kills the Ancient One. Stephen Strange becomes the Ancient One's new apprentice and, through that journey, begins to grow into a better, more selfless man. When Mordo seeks revenge by trying to open a dimensional gateway that would let Dormammu enter Earth and conquer humanity, Strange is forced into a mystical battle that tests whether he's truly worthy of the title.

Gale had Strange's astral form racing across New York to find his own body

One of the coolest sequences in the entire script sees Strange's astral form return to Earth, only to discover that his physical body has been kidnapped by a pair of Mordo's goons. His astral self has to race across New York City to find his body before it's too late, because in this script, if the astral self is separated from the body for more than an hour, both cease to exist. It's the kind of sequence that would have delivered not only wild visual effects, but a real sense of urgency and panic too.

Gale was also writing within the limitations of the time. He later admitted they didn't have the money or technology to do all the dimension hopping, reality bending, Ditko style imagery from the comics, so he had to ground much of the action on Earth.

So what went wrong? Marvel was in the middle of serious financial instability, and the movie rights to Doctor Strange kept getting bought and sold between different companies. Gale did additional drafts once the property ended up at New World Pictures, but then New World went south too, killing this version of the film. When the movie was finally made decades later, Gale remarked that it was shockingly similar to the bones of his script, except for the casting of Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One, which he criticized for both whitewashing and gender swapping the character.

Alex Cox and Stan Lee set their version on the brink of ecological collapse

Next, writer and director Alex Cox, best known for Repo Man, heard that Francis Ford Coppola's company American Zoetrope had a deal with Marvel to develop its properties into scripts. He approached them with the idea of doing Doctor Strange, which he ended up writing with Stan Lee. Cox would later call it the best thing he wrote during this period.

Their story takes place at the turn of the millennium, in New York City in 1999, with Earth on the brink of ecological collapse. At the center of it all is Mordo, a powerful billionaire who runs a corporate empire accelerating deforestation, ozone depletion and global environmental destruction. We later learn he's doing it to pave the way for Dormammu. Mordo isn't only a businessman. He's a fallen sorcerer who once trained alongside Strange under their master, and has now turned to dark forces.

When Mordo sends demons to steal the Book of Vishanti, they target Strange, who is now a public paranormal expert appearing on talk shows and writing books. Their master warns him that Mordo has become a conduit for Dormammu, who plans to invade Earth during an eclipse only three days away. Meanwhile a former weather forecaster who is always right with her predictions is driven to the brink by apocalyptic visions, including a voice screaming Dormammu's name. When she sees Strange on TV, she turns to him for answers.

As Strange and the forecaster investigate Mordo's growing power, battle erupts across New York. Strange's master is killed, leaving Strange to take his place as Earth's last line of defense. As the eclipse begins, Mordo captures the forecaster and brings her to Easter Island, where the stone heads tear open reality itself to create a gateway to the Dark Dimension. Strange's astral form enters the gateway and confronts Mordo in a fierce magical duel, and Mordo realizes too late that Dormammu doesn't want to rule Earth, he wants to destroy it. At the climax, Clea transforms into her past self, the ancient sorcerer queen Nefertiti, unleashing a surge of power that seals the breach and stops Dormammu.

Nicolas Cage was discussed for Strange before a merchandising dispute doomed the project

Since American Zoetrope was producing, there were talks about Coppola's nephew, Nicolas Cage, playing Doctor Strange. To finance the film, Zoetrope tried partnering with Regency. But Regency's distribution partner, Warner Brothers, was in a dispute with Marvel Comics over merchandising at the time and refused to be involved, ultimately dooming the project.

The closest we got to a Doctor Strange film during this period was the B movie Doctor Mordrid. It has long been rumored to have started as a Doctor Strange adaptation before the producers lost the rights and were forced to rework it to avoid copyright issues. That's not what happened. The producers brought in legendary comic artist Jack Kirby to develop original characters for them, one of which was a sorcerer he called Doctor Mortalis, later renamed Doctor Mordrid. While it wasn't directly based on Doctor Strange, the final script still pulls heavily from the character's inspiration.

David Goyer was fired from his horror take over a Doctor Mundane joke

The next attempt came from David Goyer, writer of Blade and future writer of Batman Begins. After being hired by Columbia, Goyer stuck closely to the character's origin: a selfish, materialistic man who finds redemption after traveling to Tibet and studying under a mystic. His version leaned heavily into horror, portraying characters like Mordo and Dormammu in a much more Lovecraftian light. Blade director Stephen Norrington was even attached to direct, reuniting him with Goyer.

After the success of Blade, studios began scrambling to option anything with a Marvel or DC label, assuming they could turn cheaper, lesser known heroes like the Daywalker into franchises on the scale of Spider-Man and Superman. Unfortunately, executives often had little understanding of the characters they optioned. When Goyer turned in his script, Columbia's executives told him that while they loved it, they wanted him to take the magic out. Goyer replied: "Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you wanted Doctor Strange, but I guess you wanted Doctor Mundane." As a result of that comment, he was fired the next day.

Eventually, Dimension and Miramax acquired the rights from Columbia, and Goyer was hired once again, this time to write and direct. He wanted to start the script over from scratch and use as many practical effects and in camera tricks as possible to achieve the magic in the film. Unfortunately for him, the project languished in development and he dropped out.

Neil Gaiman and Guillermo del Toro wanted a Strange who began in the 1920s

By the late 2000s, Marvel was in a position it had never been in before. After years of licensing its characters to different studios, it began reacquiring the rights to several properties and formed Marvel Studios to finance and produce its own films. Instead of selling off individual heroes, it now had the ability to build something itself.

Around this time, Neil Gaiman, the bestselling author and comic writer best known for The Sandman and American Gods, contacted Marvel about developing a Doctor Strange film with Guillermo del Toro attached as a potential director. Their take leaned heavily into the character's origins, drawing directly from the style of Steve Ditko. One key idea was to push Strange's story back in time. He would become a disbarred surgeon and alcoholic in the 1920s, discover the mystic arts in the 30s and train to become the world's greatest magician, then settle in Greenwich Village for decades, unchanged and largely unnoticed. The goal was to make him feel completely out of time, a figure quietly existing in the background for nearly a century.

The project never moved forward. Marvel was focused on building out its core lineup, characters like Iron Man, Captain America and Thor, while lesser known, more unconventional characters like Doctor Strange were pushed further down the line. Eventually Marvel Studios began the Marvel Writers Project, hiring writers to develop scripts for characters including Doctor Strange.

Scott Derrickson won the job with an astral plane pitch, and Kevin Feige swapped Nightmare for Dormammu

By the time the film finally began moving forward at Marvel, it had become one of the most sought after directing jobs the studio had ever offered, with more filmmakers lobbying for it than for any previous film. Among them was Scott Derrickson, known for horror films like The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Sinister, someone with a clear handle on the supernatural.

Instead of only pitching his take, Derrickson went much further. He put together concept art, storyboards and even an animated sequence inspired by the comic Doctor Strange: The Oath, centered on a fight in the astral plane while a doctor struggled to save Strange's physical body in the hospital. That pitch is ultimately what set him apart. Marvel officially chose Derrickson to direct, and his pitch sequence became one of the film's central set pieces.

Early on, Derrickson wanted to use Nightmare as the villain, introducing the idea of nightmares as their own dimension. Kevin Feige pushed back. With the film already introducing the mystic arts, alternate dimensions and Strange's origin, Feige felt adding a dream dimension would be too much for a single film to handle and would only confuse audiences. Instead, he suggested Dormammu.

Joaquin Phoenix entered advanced talks before Marvel returned to Benedict Cumberbatch

To play Strange, Marvel, Derrickson and the writers all had one actor in mind: Benedict Cumberbatch. The problem was that his schedule made things complicated, forcing Marvel to at least explore other options. The most serious alternative was Joaquin Phoenix, who entered advanced talks for the role.

On paper, Phoenix made sense: a high profile actor with the intensity the character requires. But he was also known for being unpredictable, particularly when it came to long term commitments. He later nearly dropped out of Joker during development, and he also walked away from a Todd Haynes film days before production was set to begin. Ultimately, Phoenix passed on the role, reportedly unwilling to commit to Marvel's deal covering multiple pictures.

In the end, Marvel went back to its original choice and changed the film's production schedule to fit around Cumberbatch's other commitments. After decades of alternate versions, false starts and abandoned scripts, Doctor Strange finally made it to the screen, just one outcome in a timeline full of possibilities.