Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Sam Raimi, 2022)

[Big Ben]

I suppose it simply come down to how much control Raimi has over the production. That phrase "A camel is a horse designed by committee" comes to mind. I'm certain Marvel could at least market on his name alone.

[Monterey Jack]

I mean, Raimi was allowed a great deal of leeway on Spider-Man 2 when the first became a smash hit, and it turned out to be the best and most "Raimi-esque" of the trilogy, but the MCU hasn't exactly been an auteur-friendly machine. The first Thor was a neat fit with director Kenneth Branagh's Shakespearean fetishes, but the second was directed by...the guy who made Terminator: Genisys and a bunch of Game Of Thrones episodes.

That's because the MCU is, at this point, a television series writ large, and most TV shows don't have big-name filmmakers allowed to slather their stylistic tics and recurring thematic ideas on individual episodes, because that'd be distracting watching those episodes back-to-back. Disney wants as consistent a style in these films as possible (same color-timing, same visual F/X, same mediocre, droning scores with no discernable melodies), so to suddenly have a manic, Sam Raimi Dr. Strange would be like biting into a Twinkie, only to find it filled with hot sauce. Yeah, Raimi fans like me might be delighted, but MCU audiences would probably find it weird and confusing. I'd love to see Raimi allowed to go nuts with this property, but I bet he'd be creatively muzzled by the experience.

[barryconvex]

Maybe someone at a Disney board meeting will say, "look everybody, we've made so much damn money out of this property already, why don't we let an artist try and get us some credibility back with that part of our audience that respects quality filmmaking. Who's with me?" (sound of crickets)

[tenia]

The day shareholders all died and growth returns doesn't matter anymore, yeah, sure.

[jazzo]

I didn't see it and probably never will but Dumbo looked way better than any of the other live action Disney remakes (though I'm guessing the crows didn't make it)

It wasn't. Even my kids were asking to leave three-quarters of the way through.

[knives]

I thought the new Doctor Strange was quite good and stylishly shot. It helped a lot that it forwent a lot of the superheroics in favor of a story about loss and working through the effects of your decisions.

[Matt]

Incredibly, this is actually a very fun movie. It does suffer from some of the usual Marvel second unit bloat and illegible action sequences, but the Raimi signature is a lot more prominent than I had anticipated. Easily the best film entry I’ve seen in the otherwise charmless Phase Four. (I still have two more to power through, and I won’t be bothered with the TV stuff).

[ntnon]

...the otherwise charmless Phase Four. (I still have two more to power through, and I won’t be bothered with the TV stuff).

The TV Stuff is actually uniformly pretty good. WandaVision, Loki and Moon Knight especially, but they're all well done.