Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of MadnessSave

The film opens in a flowing magical dimension where a different version of Doctor Strange — clean-shaven, ponytailed, in a slightly different cloak — is fleeing a demonic creature alongside a teenage girl. The girl, America Chavez, has the unique multiversal ability to punch open star-shaped portals between realities, but cannot yet control when she does so. The demon attacks. This Strange tries to harvest America's powers in order to save them both, an act that will kill her in the process. Before he can complete the absorption, the demon kills him. America activates her ability accidentally and falls through a portal to a different reality. Cut to the prime MCU. The original Strange we know wakes from this exact dream the morning of Christine Palmer's wedding to another man. He attends the reception, makes peace with his lost love, and wishes her well.

Walking the streets of Manhattan after the reception, Strange witnesses an interdimensional invasion from above. A massive octopus-tentacled creature called Gargantos is chasing the same teenager from his dream. Strange and Wong intercept and defeat Gargantos. They take America to Kamar-Taj, where she explains everything. The recurring dreams Strange has been having are not dreams. They are the lives of Strange variants in other realities, witnessed by his consciousness as it bleeds across the multiverse. America is being hunted by an unknown entity that wants to harvest her powers to traverse the multiverse permanently. Strange consults the Book of Vishanti — Kamar-Taj's most sacred grimoire — for a counterspell.

Strange travels to a Westview-style suburban paradise to consult Wanda Maximoff for help. Wanda, ostensibly returned to a quiet life after the events of WandaVision, welcomes him at her cottage. The conversation immediately turns sinister. Strange realizes Wanda is the entity hunting America. She has been corrupted by the Darkhold — the ancient grimoire of dark sorcery she had read at the end of WandaVision. The Darkhold has shown her, across the multiverse, alternate realities where her telekinetically-conceived children Billy and Tommy are real. She has decided that taking America's multiverse-traversal powers and absorbing them into herself will let her physically inhabit a reality where her children exist. America's life is the price.

Wanda attacks Kamar-Taj. The fortress falls in a brutal sequence; many of Strange's fellow sorcerers die in the assault. America's panic causes her to accidentally portal Strange and herself to a vibrant alternate reality — Earth-838. They land in a Manhattan that resembles their own but with subtle differences. Wong is captured by Wanda and forced to reveal the location of the most powerful magical site in the multiverse: Mount Wundagore, where the Darkhold's spells were originally inscribed and where Wanda can perform the rite to harvest America. Strange, on Earth-838, is identified by sentinel guards as a wanted criminal and is imprisoned by the Illuminati — that universe's ruling council of superheroes.

The Illuminati of Earth-838 is one of the film's most discussed sequences. The council includes: Captain Carter (Peggy Carter, the super-soldier of her reality, voiced by Hayley Atwell); Captain Marvel (Maria Rambeau in a Photon-style suit, played by Lashana Lynch); Mr. Fantastic (a brief but iconic cameo by John Krasinski as Reed Richards); Black Bolt (Anson Mount); Professor X (a returning Patrick Stewart, in his original X-Men gold mobile chair); and a memorial absence representing this reality's deceased Doctor Strange. The Illuminati explain to the alternate Strange that he had once destroyed nearly all life in this universe by attempting to harvest America's powers — exactly what Wanda is currently doing. They had executed him for it. Wanda arrives at the Illuminati base via dreamwalking through her Earth-616 consciousness into her Earth-838 self's body, and she massacres the entire Illuminati within minutes.

Strange and America escape to a destroyed parallel universe — a dead Earth where his alternate self is still alive but corrupted by the Darkhold. The two Stranges fight a magical duel using musical notes as projectile weapons (the Battle of Music, scored by composer Danny Elfman). The original Strange wins by dropping the corrupted Strange into the void where the Eye of Agamotto's last fragment rests. Strange uses the Darkhold from this destroyed reality to dreamwalk back into his own body across realities. Wanda catches up with America at Mount Wundagore as the harvesting ritual begins. America, finally trusting her power for the first time, opens a star-shaped portal that drops Wanda into the Earth-838 cottage of her own variant — face-to-face with that reality's Billy and Tommy.

The Earth-838 children, terrified by Wanda's monstrous appearance, scream and beg her not to hurt them. Wanda, watching her own children fear her, finally breaks. She realizes the woman she has become has nothing in common with the mother she dreamed of being. She returns to Mount Wundagore, telekinetically destroys the entire Darkhold across every multiverse and brings the mountain down on top of herself. Whether she has died is left deliberately ambiguous. America returns Strange to his own reality. She enrolls at Kamar-Taj as Wong's new student in mystical arts. Strange develops a third eye on his forehead — a side effect of having used the Darkhold himself. The film closes on Strange collapsing in a Manhattan street, the third eye opening through a forehead crease.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness grossed $955 million globally — one of the strongest Phase 4 box-office results. Director Sam Raimi, returning to the superhero genre fifteen years after Spider-Man 3, brought his signature horror-film register: jump scares, dutch angles, undead apparitions, jump-cuts to a flock of zombie demons made from the souls of the damned. The film's tonal departure from the more polished Marvel Studios house style was praised by some critics and criticized by others. Elizabeth Olsen's performance as a fully-corrupted Scarlet Witch was widely considered her best work in the franchise. The Illuminati sequence drew enormous crowds (and crowd reactions) in theaters; Patrick Stewart's brief return to Professor X was particularly cheered. The film's ending left several plot threads dangling — the third-eye complication, the ambiguity of Wanda's fate, and the fate of the Darkhold counter-grimoire — that would presumably resolve in a future Doctor Strange entry.

Sam Raimi's directorial fingerprints are visible throughout the production. His longtime collaborator Bruce Campbell (a frequent supporting player in the Evil Dead trilogy) cameos as a pizza-ball vendor cursed by Strange to repeatedly punch himself for several weeks — a Three Stooges-style sight gag dropped into the middle of a multiverse-wrecking blockbuster. Danny Elfman, Raimi's regular composer for Spider-Man 1 through 3, returned to score the film with motifs that recurred from his earlier Marvel work. The film's central villain twist — that Wanda has been the antagonist all along, with the demon-pursuing-America opening sequence already corrupted by her dreamwalking — was carefully concealed in the marketing. The climactic Mount Wundagore sequence drew its mythological foundation from old Marvel comics involving the cosmic entity Chthon and the Bloodstone artifact tradition. Subsequent Marvel films and Disney+ series have left Wanda's fate strategically unresolved, allowing for her return in future cosmic-tier storylines.