Doctor Strange’s Scott Derrickson Would Direct a Constantine Movie

Things have changed a lot for Scott Derrickson since leaving Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. He’s now talked about the prospect of doing a Constantine movie on social media. A fan asked the director about the possibility of doing a Justice League Dark movie and he was thinking more along the lines of the man in the trench coat. Despite the Marvel shakeup, many fans are still wondering what exact personal differences cause the split between the filmmaker and the studio. They will probably never get the answer they’re looking for, but news of Derrickson departing the project prompted a bunch of observers to note some words Kevin Feige said to the New York Film Academy about the Doctor Strange follow-up.

“I mean, there are horrifying sequences in [Raiders of the Lost Ark] that I as a little kid would [cover my eyes] when their faces melted. Or Temple of Doom, of course, or Gremlins, or Poltergeist,” Feige said during a Q&A. “These are the movies that invented the PG-13 rating, by the way. They were PG and then they were like, ‘We need another [rating].’ But that’s fun. It’s fun to be scared in that way, and not a horrific, torturous way, but a way that is legitimately scary — because Scott Derrickson is quite good at that — but scary in the service of an exhilarating emotion.”

That came after Derrickson said this at San Diego Comic-Con last summer, “If I’m gonna do it, it has to go into the territory that drew me into the Doctor Strange comics in the first place, which is how they dipped into the gothic and the horror and the horrific, and we’re gonna make the first scary MCU film.”

A report on the split called the parting of ways a result of creative difference. It referenced an “amicable parting ways,” and that is corroborated by the statement that Marvel Studios put out. The company says they “remain grateful to Scott for his contributions to the MCU.” Derrickson would later tweet that he and Marvel “mutually agreed to part ways.” Despite that bit of turnover the studio is still targeting a May 7, 2021 release date for the film. Adding to that intrigue is the fact that news reports of the company approaching Sam Raimi to direct the film followed a few days later. That sent the Internet speculation machine into overdrive.

Whoever will end up helming the Doctor Strange sequel, it won’t be the man who directed The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Sinister and Deliver Us from Evil. Now comic book fans wait with bated breath to see what Marvel has in store for Doctor Strange’s massive adventure.