Marvel is planning to make a movie around the comic book character Dr Strange. I suspect that your reaction to this news – like mine, like most people's – is that you never knew it made the comic.
But then, among comics fans, enjoying Dr Strange has always carried a certain mark of connoisseurship. Created in 1963, Strange was imagined as a brilliant but egotistical surgeon who discovers magical powers (and a conscience) after his hands are injured in an accident.
The mysticism of the stories and their psychedelic visuals found a small, discerning fanbase at the time, but it is hard to see why Marvel expects them to make a lot of money from them now. A previous TV movie adaptation in 1978, for what it's worth, was an abject flop.
To the outsider, there is a certainly a feeling of "peak superhero" about all this. And indeed a wealth of other comic-book adaptions are already struggling to get made. Ant-Man has just switched directors after eight years in development. Power Pack (a sort of pre-teen Fantastic Four) never quite happened. Nor has The Flash, so far. A decent Wonder Woman movie is almost permanently not being filmed.
Perhaps the recruitment of Dr Strange – along with the ceaseless re-rebooting of Spider-Man and Superman – is a sign that the good heroes are at last running out? If so, we might still not see the end of them for a long time. Marvel says it has its movie releases all scheduled until 2021, and vast reserves of old superheroes remain, just waiting to be fracked.
Black Panther, Tom Strong, Spider-Girl, The Lost Generation and dozens more could be announced before some more reliable revenue stream – perhaps original screenplays? – replaces them. And of course Marvel, which is owned by Disney, is on stupendous form. Iron Man was strictly a recherché taste until director Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr made a jolly franchise out of him. The world was not crying out for Thor the movie, but it then spent $450m going to see it, and a further $645m on its sequel.
Meanwhile The Avengers, a tasting menu of minor Marvel heroes, grossed more than a $1.5bn. Perhaps only mild recognition is needed, provided you have good actors, writers and effects.
Nevertheless, the lowering of expectations by Dr Strange fans has already begun. "There's every possibility that a Dr Strange film could be well written and entertaining," Noah Berlatsky says in the Atlantic. "But there's very little chance that a Dr Strange film will have much of the particular charm, or the greatness, of the original comics."
To the billions who never read them in the first place, that will not be a disaster.
