Alexis Wajsbrot, one of the VFX artists who worked on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, has revealed that Kevin Feige requested two major Marvel fixtures be added to the film.

One of the sequences Alexis Wajsbrot’s team at Framestore VFX oversaw in the Doctor Strange sequel involved Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange and Xochitl Gomez’s America Chavez hurtling through multiple realities. In the span of 40 seconds, they tear through 20 different universes. In a few blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments, they pass through realities that should look familiar to fans of Marvel comics.

The Living Tribunal & The Savage Land

While many fans were quick to pick out what looked like the multiple faces of Marvel’s Living Tribunal in this reality-hopping sequence from Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, fewer fans noticed the dinosaur-inhabited reality that bore a striking resemblance to the Savage Land as seen in X-Men comics.

While speaking to Variety, Alexis Wajsbrot confirmed that was indeed the Living Tribunal and the Savage Land and they were added – or at least amended from the VFX team’s original ideas – at the request of Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige. As Wajsbrot explained:

“One was an Incan statue world, which ended up in the movie because Kevin Feige thought, ‘Well, that could be a great world to put the Living Tribunal in.’ So that world became the Living Tribunal world… We proposed a jungle and Kevin Feige said, ‘Well, it could be cool if it was Savage [Land].’ It’s a world that exists in the Marvel Universe, so we had to add dinosaurs. We had to model and texture and render and animate dinosaurs for two seconds, which is extremely not cost-efficient.”

The Living Tribunal is a cosmic entity in Marvel comics, who serves as the ultimate authority in the multiverse, tasked with preserving cosmic balance. The Savage Land is a prehistoric land, where dinosaurs still roam, and is home to Marvel characters like Ka-Zar and Sauron. It has been visited by the X-Men on multiple occasions and was at one point Magneto’s base of operations. The inclusion of these two locations in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness may well hint that audiences are likely to see more of them both in the MCU’s not-too-distant future.

Here is the synopsis for the film:

The MCU unlocks the Multiverse and pushes its boundaries further than ever before. Journey into the unknown with Doctor Strange, who, with the help of mystical allies both old and new, traverses the mind-bending and dangerous alternate realities of the Multiverse to confront a mysterious new adversary.

Directed by Sam Raimi from a script written by Michael Waldron, the Marvel film stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Elizabeth Olsen, Benedict Wong, Xochitl Gomez, with Michael Stuhlbarg, Rachel McAdams, and Patrick Stewart.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is in theaters now. Stay tuned for all the latest news surrounding the future of Doctor Strange and the MCU, and make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more content!

Source: Variety