Kevin Feige On Supervillain Doppelgangers In Superhero Films

Nearly every major superhero has a foe who is just the evil version of that character.

Superman has Bizarro, Green Lantern has Sinestro, Captain America has the Red Skull, Spider-Man has Venom, and so on.

It's such a common phenomenon that a recent issue of Erik Larsen's long-running comic Savage Dragon made fun of it in Marvel's Ant-Man, with a character pointing out all of the doppelganger villains and then saying of Yellowjacket, "You know who's a bigger threat to a guy the size of an ant? Everybody else! Literally every other person on the planet is a bigger threat."

In the case of the forthcoming Doctor Strange movie, the long-running Marvel Cinematic Universe will see the introduction of magic to their world -- but Strange won't be squaring off against just any supervillain: he'll be battling another magic user. With some fans thinking this is just another example of the Iron-Monger/Loki/General Zod dynamic, Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige recently addressed the idea during a visit to the set of Doctor Strange.

"You want to have characters that inhabit the same world. We're introducing a new world in this a new mythology for lack of a better term. You want to explore that as much as you can," Feige said of Doctor Strange's villain being a fellow magic user. "When you're teaching an audience about sorcerers and about that reality and you're going to talk about the past anyway and you're going to get into their history anyway, it's much better to tie in your bad guy with that instead of lay all this groundwork of parallel dimensions and sorcery and then say, 'By the way, a meteor hit that side of the world and went under water. This evil kind of thing developed.' 'What's that have to do with magic ?' 'Nothing but we got to stop it.' Needless to say, it's more characters that counter each other in other families that surely are going to be up against things that they don't know anything about and have no comparable to."

Doctor Strange, which will be in theaters in November, stars Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock, Star Trek Into Darkness, The Imitation Game), Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave), Rachel McAdams (Sherlock Holmes), Michael Stuhlbarg (A Serious Man), Mads Mikkelsen (Casino Royale) and Tilda Swinton (The Grand Budapest Hotel).

The film is directed by Scott Derrickson (Sinister) and written by Derrickson, Jon Spaihts (Prometheus), and C. Robert Cargill (Sinister).

Marvel's Doctor Strange is produced by Kevin Feige with Louis D'Esposito, Victoria Alonso, Charles Newirth, Stephen Broussard and Stan Lee serving as executive producers.

Doctor Strange arrives November 4, 2016; Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 – May 5, 2017; Spider-Man: Homecoming– July 7, 2017; Thor: Ragnarok – November 3, 2017; Black Panther – February 16, 2018; Avengers: Infinity War – May 4, 2018; Ant-Man and the Wasp – July 6, 2018; Captain Marvel– March 8, 2019; Avengers 4 – May 3, 2019; and as-yet untitled Marvel movies on July 12, 2019, and on May 1, July 10, and November 6 in 2020.