If there’s anything that’s going to finally get me back into the terrifying prospect of a crowded, dark room with poor ventilation, it’s Sam Raimi directing a Doctor Strange sequel. But unless Strange PhD has cast another of his wayward spells, I’m going to be spending far too much time staring at the background actors. It’s all because of the multiversal madness in a promotional snippet handed to IMDB, and once I’ve pointed it out, you’ll never be able to unsee it.
Seemingly originally spotted by Twitter user @jbhayek8, the Internet Movie Database’s exclusive little clip of Doc Strange fighting a massive invisible octopus shows the same poor brown-suited (and from his expression, trousered) man fleeing from the scene over and over and over (and over) again, all in just one minute of footage.
@jbhayek8 counted him four times, but by our count, the unfortunate man and his man-bag appear at least six times in front of Strange, having to run past him to escape. Count them with us…
Is Strange maliciously casting one of his famous orange portals (stolen without consent from Aperture Labs)? That’d be particularly mean of him, and make for a lot of extra work, given the enormous killer cephalopod that’s rather occupying his attention.
Perhaps it is a previously unknown power of America Chavez, who dives onto that bus at the start of the clip, and then in some impressive continuity, is inside it in the middle of the scene, and then rescued when falling out of it near the end.
Of course errant details like this often crop up in movies, and people love to pore over films to find the tiniest of continuity errors, then crow about them like they’ve just disproved the authenticity of this documentary footage. But this one is particularly egregious, and not least when it was hand-picked to be given out as promotional material for one of the biggest film sites on the web. We’ve reached out to Marvel to ask if they know what might be happening here.
Still, I cannot wait to see this. Sam Raimi does Marvel, for the first time in 18 years! The only way the above could have been better if the guy running away had been Bruce Campbell.