Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Movie)

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    When Motherhood Is a Horror Show

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    For the onscreen moms in “The Baby,” “Umma” and “Lamb” — and for an ascendant class of sardonic mom influencers — the source of psychological torture is motherhood itself.In the first episode of “The Baby,” a new comedic horror series on HBO Max, an infant falls into a childless woman’s arms, as if dropped there by a cosmic stork. But the special delivery is not a blessing — it’s a curse.Natasha (Michelle de Swarte), the 38-year-old chef who catches the gurgling babe, does not want children. She has watched with disgust as her friends have vanished into motherhood; now they are always droning on about their babies, going on play dates with their babies, telling Natasha to stop smoking cigarettes around their babies. The baby-from-the-sky quickly reveals himself to be a supernatural manifestation of her own dying youth. Once he starts crawling after Natasha, everyone around her ends up dead or maimed.The show is a not-quite-sendup of a genre that imbues the trials of motherhood with a paranormal charge. The mothers in several horror movies released this year are not straightforward villains (like the mother in “Carrie”) or innocent naïfs (as in “Rosemary’s Baby”), but sympathetic figures who become implicated in haunting family dysfunctions.In “Umma,” a beekeeping single mom (Sandra Oh) is possessed by the ghost of her own mother. In “Lamb,” an Icelandic farmer (Noomi Rapace) adopts a hybrid lamb-human newborn she discovers in her barn, with monstrous results. Marvel’s flirtation with horror, in the director Sam Raimi’s zombified “Doctor Strange” sequel, finds its villain in a mother, a lurching Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), who is willing to wreak havoc across as many universes as it will take to reunite with her children.Even “The Twin,” an original film from the horror streaming service Shudder, cycles through a mess of clichés (evil twin, Scandinavian occultism, Faustian bargain) before landing on mommy psychodrama. Though these mothers often carry past domestic traumas — abuse, neglect, infant loss — their stories signal that there is something psychologically harrowing about the role of motherhood itself.Inside the World of ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’In this mind-expanding, idiosyncratic take on the superhero film, a laundromat owner is the focus of a grand, multiversal showdown.Review: Our film critic called “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an exuberant swirl of genre anarchy.The Protagonist: Over the years, Michelle Yeoh has built her image as a combat expert. For this movie, she drew on her emotional reserves.The Villain: The actress Stephanie Hsu, who plays an all-powerful evil being, talks about how clothes convey the full range of her character.A Lovelorn Romantic: A child star in the 1980s, Ke Huy Quan returns to acting as the husband of Yeoh’s character, a role blanding action and drama.A Healing Experience: For some viewers, the movie was a way to reflect on how the effects of trauma can be passed down between generations.In pregnancy, birth and young life, the horror tropes abound. Growing another human being inside your body is a natural human process that can nevertheless feel eerie, alien and supernatural. Also, gory. When the photographer Heji Shin began taking unsentimental photographs of babies at birth, “I looked at them and I was like, This is literally ‘The Exorcist,’” she told T Magazine. Bringing life into the world also brings death viscerally close. Thousands of infants die unexpectedly in the first year of their lives. Giving birth in the United States is more than 20 times as lethal as skydiving. Even the most desired and successful of pregnancies (let alone the kind that anti-abortion laws would require be carried to term) can conjure themes of shape-shifting, disfigurement, possession and torture.The pandemic surfaced horrors of a more quotidian nature: the drudgeries of ceaseless child rearing. The veneration of motherly fortitude and sacrifice endemic to nature documentaries and Mother’s Day Instagram tributes has always disguised an American disinterest in functionally supporting mothers and other caretakers. But recently the image of the overworked American mother has assumed a darker valence, as new levels of isolation and stress have unleashed a maternal desperation that’s been described as “primal,” “Sisyphean,” and, as the writer Amil Niazi put it in The Cut last year, “like my brain is burning and so is my entire house and someone just stole the fire extinguisher.”Often a mother’s own fixation on such darker themes is written off, trivialized as old news or pathologized as postpartum depression. So it makes sense for it all to get sublimated into horror. In fact, it makes so much sense that the outcome is often a little too on the nose. Psychological frights that jumped from the screen in earlier mother-focused films, like “The Babadook” (from 2014) and “Hereditary” (2018), now seem to drift wearily through pop culture, as stories of motherhood are retold again and again through the blunt instruments of horror.When a woman notices bizarre behavior in her young son in “The Twin,” the twist is foreshadowed via the diagnosis of a shrink, who tells her that her child “is a mirror — he’s a reflection of your emotions and fears.” In “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness,” Wanda Maximoff fashions the tension into a tagline: “I’m not a monster, I’m a mother,” she says. And in “Umma,” as Oh’s character endures a tedious possession by her abusive mother’s ghost, a kindly neighbor (Dermot Mulroney) vocalizes the old saw that grinds through the whole movie: “Oh God, I can hear myself turning into my mother.”Tania Franco Klein for The New York Times“The Baby” is clever to convert this mode into comedy, though the mood soon darkens. At first, Natasha’s antipathy toward parenthood feels refreshingly specific, with its focus on the mundane degradations that can haunt the imaginations of the happily childless. A soiled diaper escalates into a scene of body horror; a struggle to collapse a stroller ends with a severed finger. But the murderous-baby metaphor assumes more and more of motherhood’s potential pitfalls with every episode. Soon the show is also about postpartum depression and forced birth and compulsory heterosexuality and intergenerational trauma.There’s something frustrating about this relentless construction of motherhood as a horror show, and not just because mothers experience the full range of human emotions (some of which are more faithfully explored in a Hallmark movie). By breaking a taboo, the genre has created a new cliché: of the exhausted mother pushed to her psychological breaking point. Though the lack of support for mothers is a structural problem, it is reframed as a personal one, with a narrative resolution that resembles a postpartum therapy session or an invitation to collectively scream. Mothers are made to suffer, and then they are flattened into a long-suffering mother persona.On the internet, there is a cutesy horror-inspired term for this kind of mother: the mombie. This lightly ironic version of the overwhelmed mom persona is ascendant on Instagram, TikTok and e-commerce novelty sites, where the lobotomized stereotype of the mommy influencer is countered with a version of motherhood defined by bedraggled debasement. In this exaggerated burlesque performance, motherhood is analogized to prison, or the feeling of a child’s scooter wheel repeatedly hitting you in the ankle bone for all eternity.These jokes are often accompanied by sincere messages about how negative feelings about motherhood are valid, and that it’s important to speak out. But the persona can also seem curiously invested in feeling aggrieved, as if the conversion of suffering into content is itself a balm. A common joke format is to complain that men do not help, but that when they do help, they do not help correctly. If you can’t relate, perhaps it is because you are so smugly privileged that you can pay other women to perform the drudgery of motherhood for you. (A recent “Atlanta” episode actually mines great comedy-horror from this premise: When the Trinidadian nanny for a rich white boy dies suddenly, the parents are haunted by the dawning realization that she was more family to their son than they were.)I found relief from this narrative trap in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which unchains its overworked mother character from the limits of the domestic horror genre by vaulting her into a multiverse of thrilling supernatural possibilities. The film begins with Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), a laundromat owner pestered by her aging father, her bumbling husband, her depressed teenage daughter and the I.R.S. Her life has devolved, as she puts it, into the endless repetition of “laundry and taxes” — until she learns that a plethora of Evelyns exist in endless multiverses, that she happens to be living the most disappointing possible version of her life, and that now she must access her untapped potential in order to save the worlds. “Everything Everywhere” accesses familiar themes of fraught mother-daughter relationships and overburdened moms, but this time the film’s whole paranormal dimension is built around Evelyn’s powerful complexity.After a numbing few weeks of watching mothers tortured onscreen, the absurdly funny “Everything Everywhere” is the one that actually made me cry. But even during this elevated viewing experience, I was reminded that I was still living in our universe. Before the previews began, the theater screened a KFC commercial where a family gathers around the table for a fried chicken dinner. We hear each of their internal monologues as they dig in: “Mmm, mac and cheese,” the son thinks. “Mmm, tenders,” thinks the father. Then we hear the mind of the mother, who is nourished only by a respite from her domestic burden: “Mmmm,” she thinks. “Silence.” More

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      How Elizabeth Olsen Came Into Her Powers

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      The actress started as an indie darling and never expected to become a Marvel linchpin as Wanda Maximoff. But she’s now so invested in the role, she’s open to a solo film.Elizabeth Olsen is used to waiting in the wings. When she was an acting student at New York University, she landed an understudy role in the Broadway play “Impressionism,” starring Jeremy Irons. The show ran for 56 performances. Olsen didn’t take the stage a single time.That sort of lost opportunity could mess with an actress’s mind, but Olsen was never in any hurry to seize the spotlight. Years later, when she was cast as the reality-bending witch Wanda Maximoff in “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” her character was more of an ancillary Avenger than the main event, and in three subsequent Marvel films — each with a more overstuffed ensemble of superheroes than the last — Olsen never rose higher than 10th billing.But a funny thing happened after biding all of that time: “WandaVision,” a sitcom spoof about Wanda and her android husband, became an unexpected phenomenon when it made its debut early last year on Disney+. This month, “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” which counts Olsen as its co-lead and pits her troubled witch against Benedict Cumberbatch’s goateed sorcerer, has proved even more major. The movie collected $185 million in its first three days of release, ranking 11th among the biggest domestic opening weekends of all time.For Olsen, who initially made her mark in independent films, this is the equivalent of turning a comic-book page to find yourself the subject of a massive splash panel. During a video call last week, I asked how it felt to come to the fore as a blockbuster leading lady.“I’m totally mortified!” she said. “I won’t watch it.”Hours after we spoke, Olsen would walk the red carpet at the Hollywood premiere of “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” but she planned to flee the theater as soon as the movie began. “This is pressure I’m feeling for the first time,” she explained. “I have a lot of anxiety with ‘Doctor Strange’ coming out because I’ve never really had to lead a commercial film by myself.”Olsen wanted to act since she was a child, but she was willing to wait after watching the experience of her sisters Mary-Kate and Ashley.Rosie Marks for The New York TimesShe coughed, unwrapping a foil package: “Sorry, I have a lozenge.”Olsen, 33, is casual and friendly, exuding a California glow so powerful that you would hardly know she had been sick for days. “It’s just annoying,” she said, swigging water from a Mason jar. “I think my body really wants to chill out.” She embarked on this global press tour the day after wrapping a seven-and-a-half-month shoot for the HBO limited series “Love and Death,” the sort of packed schedule that also required her to film “WandaVision” and “Doctor Strange” back to back.Because her “Doctor Strange” director, Sam Raimi, had not yet watched all of “WandaVision” when shooting began, it fell to Olsen to thread the tricky line through the two projects. In the Disney+ series, Wanda is so bereft after the death of her true love, Vision (Paul Bettany), that she invents an elaborate sitcom reality where he’s still alive, then adds two kids to complete the illusion. But in “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” she takes a much harder turn: Corrupted by a demonic book of spells, Wanda breaks bad and throttles a cast of good guys while on a multiverse-spanning trip to find her children.Olsen “is scary not because of her destructive powers or her diabolical ambitions, but because she is so sad,” our critic A.O. Scott wrote. And if you still feel sympathetic to Wanda as she makes mincemeat of our heroes, it’s because of Olsen’s efforts to ground the character in something that feels specific and intimate. When Wanda issues a deadly threat, Olsen lets her voice go soft, and her eyes fill with tears and regret: There’s a real person in there. (Though other actresses in the supervillain realm tilt toward camp, Olsen understands that when you’re hovering in midair and wearing a red tiara, things are already arch enough.)But six Marvel projects in, is this the kind of big-screen career she expected? Not exactly.“It took me away from the physical ability to do certain jobs that I thought were more aligned with the things I enjoyed as an audience member,” Olsen said. “And this is me being the most honest.”Olsen in “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.” She had fullfilled her contractual obligations to Marvel in 2018 with “Avengers: Infinity War,” and “the power to choose to continue was important to me.”Marvel StudiosOLSEN HAD KNOWN she wanted to act since she was a child, but she also knew she didn’t want to act as a child. Any curiosity she might have had about fame was quieted by growing up alongside her sisters Mary-Kate and Ashley, who were cast in “Full House” before they were even a year old. The life-warping scrutiny of stardom could wait.Anyway, she felt far more comfortable in a group. Olsen played high school volleyball and sparked to the team’s camaraderie: Everyone could have their solo moment, but they had to work together to succeed. Even in college, when she started to audition for movies, she was in no rush to leave the theatrical ensemble she had come through school with.But film acting isn’t always as egalitarian. In 2011, Olsen stormed the Sundance Film Festival with a pair of star vehicles: “Silent House,” a single-take thriller that keeps its lens trained on her for 87 minutes, and “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” which cast her as an ex-cult member struggling to move on. That one-two punch led people to dub her the “it girl” of Park City, but as movers and shakers queued up in the snow to meet her, Olsen didn’t trust a thing they said.“It really felt like everyone was speaking through both sides of their mouth,” she said. “I was like, ‘This is a bubble.’ It felt like I was literally in a snow globe.”She came out of that experience knowing just two things: She didn’t want to be typecast as the crying indie girl, but she didn’t want to be thrust right into big-budget movies, either. “That looked scary to me, that kind of pressure,” she said.Still, sometimes it’s nice to be invited to the party. A few years into her acting career, after a streak of low-key indies, she asked her agent why she was never in the running for higher-profile movies. The reply: “People don’t think that you want to do them.”Did she? That’s a question Olsen had to ask herself then — and still does, from time to time. She decided she needed to put herself out there more, and signed on to a 2014 remake of “Godzilla,” reasoning that at least it was directed by Gareth Edwards, who until then had been an independent filmmaker.And then came the role of Wanda, and with her, entrée into Hollywood’s biggest franchise. As Olsen mulled Marvel’s offer to star in “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” she listed the pros: It would defy her indie typecasting. She’d once again be part of an ensemble, albeit a superpowered one. And her “Godzilla” co-star Aaron Taylor-Johnson was willing to come aboard as Wanda’s brother, Pietro, ensuring she wouldn’t go it alone. They signed on to “Ultron” as a pair.But Pietro was killed off at the end of that film, and as a shaken Wanda continued on through the Marvel Cinematic Universe, wondering if she really fit in, Olsen pondered the same question. Because of her Marvel commitments, she had to turn down a starring role in the Yorgos Lanthimos dark comedy “The Lobster,” and it didn’t take a multiverse for Olsen to imagine how that film would have propelled her down an entirely different path as an actress.“I started to feel frustrated,” she said. “I had this job security but I was losing these pieces that I felt were more part of my being. And the further I got away from that, the less I became considered for it.” “WandaVision” wasn’t expected to be a major Disney+ series. Consequently, Olsen said, “there was no pressure, no fear. It was a really healthy experience.”Rosie Marks for The New York TimesHer initial contract with Marvel covered two starring roles and a cameo, though Marvel movies are so mammoth that the studio could have deemed the five weeks Olsen spent filming “Captain America: Civil War” a brief appearance. And while her rising profile helped get indie films like “Wind River” and “Ingrid Goes West” financed, she still wondered whether Wanda’s spell-casting was worth it in the end. Had she become typecast in a totally different way? And was it all building to something that mattered?Wanda was killed off at the end of “Avengers: Infinity War,” satisfying Olsen’s three-film contract. “The power to choose to continue was important to me,” she said. And around the time the Marvel Studios head, Kevin Feige, brought Olsen in to discuss a resurrection for “Avengers: Endgame,” he pitched “WandaVision” to her. At first, she wondered if it was a demotion: TV, really? But the more she wrapped her head around it, the more she realized it was her wildest screen opportunity yet.“The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” was supposed to be Marvel’s first Disney+ series, an old-fashioned, down-the-middle action show in which the superheroes punch evildoers in every hourlong episode. “WandaVision,” by contrast, was a half-hour sitcom parody; the most significant fights of the show were marital squabbles, leavened by an eerie laugh track.“We thought what we were doing was so weird and didn’t know if we had an audience for it, so there was a freedom to it,” Olsen said. “There was no pressure, no fear. It was a really healthy experience.”But after the pandemic pushed Marvel to rejigger the order of its Disney+ series, “WandaVision” went first and became the unlikely standard-bearer. The show spawned countless memes, crashed the streaming service multiple times, and earned 23 Emmy nominations, including a best actress nod for Olsen.More important, “WandaVision” helped her fall in love with Wanda — a character she had played for years — for the very first time. The show offered a dizzying array of variations on the role — some sitcom-sparkly, others modern and morose — and the first episode, shot in front of a live audience, required all of Olsen’s theatrical training to succeed. She wasn’t sure it would resonate with a wider audience until friends sent her video clips of a Minneapolis brunch where drag queens had dressed as all of Wanda’s alter egos. “If you make it to that stage,” Olsen said with a laugh, “then you actually are part of culture.”Olsen admitted to feeling anxiety about “Doctor Strange”: “I’ve never really had to lead a commercial film by myself.”Rosie Marks for The New York TimesWith Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow out of the picture, Olsen is now the Marvel actress with the most hours clocked. Does she feel reinvigorated enough, after “WandaVision” and “Doctor Strange,” that she’d be willing to star in a solo film about her character?“I think I would,” she said. “But it really needs to be a good story. I think these films are best when it’s not about creating content, but about having a very strong point of view — not because you need to have a three-picture plan.”Now that she feels more comfortable in her signature role and in her own skin, Olsen wants to be more deliberate in her choice of roles and what she does with them. But she also told me a story from her understudy days about Jeremy Irons, who didn’t fully learn his lines until opening night of “Impressionism”; even through previews, he would muck around in front of the audience, exit the stage to peruse his pages, then come back on to muck some more. Maybe acting wasn’t something you trapped, pinned down and obsessively studied, Olsen realized then. Maybe you could embrace it as a fluid thing with an unknown destination.Olsen knows now that a Hollywood career can take turns that you never could have predicted, so you might as well enjoy where it goes. Over the weekend, she popped up on “Saturday Night Live” to support her co-star Benedict Cumberbatch; she played herself in the sketch, while the show’s Chloe Fineman played Olsen’s understudy. Sometimes, things happen to come full circle like that. Sometimes, it even feels like magic. More

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      ‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’ Review: Who’s Mad?

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      Benedict Cumberbatch returns for some more mystic Marvel mumbo-jumbo, though Sam Raimi manages to inject a sense of horror every now and then.Strange? Madness? Let’s not get carried away.I’m aware that Strange is the gentleman’s surname — his friends call him Stephen — and that he does indeed have a medical degree. Proper credentials are important in the superhero meritocracy. But like many of his colleagues in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Dr. Strange (as played by Benedict Cumberbatch) is at most mildly idiosyncratic, with hints of eccentricity in matters of dress and grooming and a whisper of pretentiousness in his attitude. If you call the enchanted garment that drapes itself over his shoulders a cape, he will be sure to remind you that it is properly described as a cloak.As for madness, the boilerplate on the Disney-Marvel intellectual property terms of service establishes strict parameters for just how crazy things can get. The surprises that await you in “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” — likely to elicit whoops and giggles of fan gratification rather than gasps of genuine wonder — have mostly to do with which other Marvel characters show up and in what company. The ones closely associated with Dr. Strange, like Wong (Benedict Wong) and Karl Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor), are not unexpected. Not unwelcome either. Nor is a new sidekick named America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), a teenager with impressive powers but no superheroic identity just yet.The studio has asked reviewers not to say much more, a request that itself gives away the whole point of the movie. “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” like so many entries in the Marvel canon, functions primarily as an advertisement for and a footnote to other stories. The title may promise abundance, but this cosmos is as gated and defended as any theme park. The signs posted here direct you mostly to the Disney+ pseudo-sitcom “WandaVision” — Elizabeth Olsen returns as Wanda Maximoff, also known as the Scarlet Witch — and the last two “Avengers” movies. Not that advance preparation is required. The ingenuity of the M.C.U. is that you can enter at any point and jump around at will.Which brings us — heavy sigh — to the multiverse, a narrative conceit recently deployed with infinitely more wit and imagination by the directing duo Daniels in the blessedly unfranchised “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” The “Doctor Strange” rendition is a succession of remarkably similar green-screen projections, with nothing much to distinguish one universe from another. At one point Strange is asked about his universe, which is also ours. “It’s beautiful,” he says, and while I wouldn’t argue with that answer, it does somehow reveal the smallness of this supercosmic vision.Explore the Marvel Cinematic UniverseThe popular franchise of superhero films and TV series continues to expand.‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’: With a touch of horror, the franchise’s newest film returns to the world of the mystic arts.‘Moon Knight’: In the Disney+ mini-series, Oscar Isaac plays a caped crusader who struggles with dissociative identity disorder.‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’: In the latest installment of the “Spider-Man” series, the web slinger continues to radiate sweet, earnest decency.‘Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings’: The superhero originated in comics filled with racist stereotypes. The movie knocked them down.In one of the other universes, there’s no such person as Spider-Man. Let that sink in. An alternate New York City has tropical flora, canals and a statue of Stephen Strange. Green means stop and red means go. Somewhere, Wanda Maximoff tends sheep in an apple orchard, unless she’s pruning apple trees in a sheep meadow.Most of it looks a lot like Marvel, at least in the first half of the movie, which was directed by Sam Raimi from a script by Michael Waldron. There is a lot of chasing and fighting, with bolts of red, blue or orange light shooting out of characters’ hands. The action happens in generic spaces that evoke no particular place or planet, and periodically stops for a mild joke, a carefully modulated expression of feeling or an explanation of something that might not have needed so much explaining. There are two magic books, one of which is also a shrine at the top of a mountain. The story makes apocalyptic stakes — the fate of the multiverse; the struggle between good and evil — seem curiously trivial.But as so often happens in the Marvel Cinematic Weltanschauung — often enough to keep even skeptics from giving up on the enterprise entirely — there is an inkling of something more interesting, in this case a Sam Raimi movie.Raimi is one of the pioneers of 21st-century movie superheroism. His Spider-Man trilogy from the early 2000s still feels relatively fresh and fun. He is also a master of horror, the creator back in the 1980s of the peerlessly ghoulish, funny and profound “Evil Dead” series. And the best parts of “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” are the sequences that traffic in zombiism, witchcraft and other dark genre arts.The creepy-crawly visual effects are much better than the fight scenes, and a sequence in which Danny Elfman’s musical score comes to life (with help from J.S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor) has the conceptual wit and visual brio of a Pixar short. Olsen, in both incarnations of her Jekyll-and-Hyde character — the doting, melancholy mother and the raging, vengeful sorceress — is scary not because of her destructive powers or her diabolical ambitions, but because she is so sad.The intensity of her maternal longing overshadows the romantic disappointment that follows Strange and Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams). There isn’t much of a love story here. There isn’t much of anything, even as there’s too much of everything. That’s how the Marvel Cinematic Universe functions. Maybe it could be different. Maybe interesting directors like Raimi and Chloé Zhao (who followed the marvelous “Nomadland” with the forgettable “Eternals”) could be allowed to do something genuinely strange with their assignments. But maybe that way madness lies.Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of MadnessRated PG-13. Nothing too crazy. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. 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      What to Know Before Seeing ‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’

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      Why do Wanda Maximoff and our title hero seem to be zombies, and what is the Darkhold? Here’s a rundown and a viewing guide to help.It was already challenging enough to keep up with the 27 films and half-dozen Disney+ TV shows in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But now, in “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” out Friday, you also have to keep track of multiple versions of Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), also known as the Scarlet Witch. And who knows who else — it is the multiverse, after all, so there are multiple versions of, well, everyone.The trailers for “Multiverse of Madness” have made it out to be a crossover event that’s maybe not “Avengers: Endgame”-level, but certainly close. Eagle-eyed fans will have spotted connections to “WandaVision,” “Loki” and even zombie versions of a few characters, apparently from Episode 5 of the lesser-known Disney+ animated series “What If … ?,” as well as the M.C.U. debut of Patrick Stewart’s Professor X, the founder of the X-Men.It’s easy to feel overwhelmed with more than three days’ worth of M.C.U. content, and there is, of course, the bare minimum option of watching the first “Doctor Strange” film and calling it a day. But those who didn’t watch “WandaVision” may be left going “Westview what?” after the new movie.Here’s a guide to the five films and series you might want to brush up on before heading to the theater.‘Doctor Strange’ (2016)Tilda Swinton and Cumberbatch in the first film.Walt Disney Studios Motion PicturesDr. Strange’s solo film debut provides a primer on how Cumberbatch’s cocky neurosurgeon, Stephen Strange, came to be a master of the mystic arts, the Sorcerer Supreme and the guardian of the Time Stone. It also introduces his tempestuous relationship with Dr. Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams), who returns in a big way in the fourth episode of “What If… ?” and also appears in a “Multiverse of Madness” trailer in a wedding gown (apparently marrying a man who is definitely not Dr. Strange, as the latter looks on from a pew). Also making a trailer appearance is Karl Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Strange’s onetime friend turned foe, as this film explains.‘Avengers: Infinity War’ (2018)Benedict Wong, left, Cumberbatch, Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr. teamed up in “Avengers: Infinity War.”Marvel/DisneyIn Dr. Strange’s “Avengers” debut, he is kidnapped by Ebony Maw, who is after the Time Stone. Tony Stark and Peter Parker eventually rescue him, and it becomes evident how much more powerful he has become since “Doctor Strange,” as he holds his own against Thanos, the Eternal-Deviant warlord, despite possessing only a single Infinity Stone compared with Thanos’s four. Strange also breaks the rules and looks forward in time to see all the possible scenarios in which the Avengers win.The film plays an important role in establishing Wanda’s back story, as its events are the source of her grief in “WandaVision,” and continue to haunt her in “Multiverse of Madness.” In the earlier movie, Wanda was forced to kill Vision, with whom she was romantically involved, to prevent Thanos from stealing the Mind Stone from Vision’s head, only to watch Thanos reverse time, pluck it out and kill Vision again.‘WandaVision’ (2021)Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff in the series.Marvel Studios/Disney+This retro-aesthetic Disney+ show is hardly peripheral; the nine-episode series, which pays homage to 1950s sitcoms like “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” supplies crucial plot details that set up the events of “Multiverse of Madness.” Wanda is essentially a co-lead of the new film, and this series illustrates how her grief over Vision’s death leads her to torment the small New Jersey town of Westview.When we last saw Wanda, in the finale’s post-credits scene, she’d just lost the versions of Vision and her twin sons she’d magically created, which led her to embrace her identity as the Scarlet Witch and begin exploring the Darkhold, a book of spells that could allow her to reunite with her now-nonexistent family.In “Multiverse of Madness,” a distraught Wanda is still struggling to process the original Vision’s death in “Avengers: Infinity War,” as well as her attempt to escape it in the fantasy she created in “WandaVision.” In one of the trailers, she is greeted by her sons in their Westview home, though Wanda’s voice-over identifies the apparently joyful reunion only as a recurring dream.‘What If … ?’ (2021)Strange variants in the animated “What If …?”Marvel Studios/Disney+This nine-episode animated anthology series, which tells the stories of alternate versions of M.C.U. heroes in multiple realities, debuted with little fanfare in August, but Episode 4 provides some important context for “Multiverse of Madness.” Titled “What If … Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands?,” it introduces a variant of Dr. Strange, Strange Supreme, created after Strange lost his girlfriend, Christine, in a car crash and became consumed by dark magic. After she vanishes in his arms, the evil Dr. Strange rips apart reality and is left alone to nurse his broken heart.While it initially seemed, from his trailer appearance, as though the Strange Supreme variant would be a main antagonist of “Multiverse of Madness,” Cumberbatch said in a recent interview that the character was not, in fact, Strange Supreme but an even more menacing version: Sinister Strange.Still there are other “What If … ?” variants who seem to appear in “Multiverse of Madness,” including a live-action version of Captain Carter (voiced by Hayley Atwell in “What If … ?”), a Peggy Carter variant who received the super-soldier serum instead of Steve Rogers and appeared in a trailer fighting a variant of the Scarlet Witch. Also returning: the terrifying Zombie Wanda and Zombie Dr. Strange from Episode 5 (“What If … Zombies?!”), which probably explains why “Multiverse of Madness” is being billed as the M.C.U.’s first horror film. Episodes 8 and 9 also show Ultron discovering multiple realities and seeking to conquer them.‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ (2021)Tom Holland as Peter Parker, opposite Cumberbatch in “Spider-Man: No Way Home.”Matt Kennedy/Sony PicturesThe director of “Multiverse of Madness,” Sam Raimi, has said that the new film is a direct continuation of the last Marvel Studios blockbuster, “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” released in December. When we last saw Dr. Strange, he’d just caused everyone to forget the existence of Peter Parker to stop the multiverse from exploding. This was necessary because of a botched spell Dr. Strange had cast that was designed to make everyone forget Peter was Spider-Man, which only ended up pulling Spider-Men and villains from alternate M.C.U. universes into the same one. At the end of “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” the spell appears to have worked, but it remains to be seen if or how the consequences of Dr. Strange’s actions will play into “Multiverse of Madness.”Bonus: ‘Loki’ (2021)Owen Wilson as Mobius M. Mobius and Tom Hiddleston as Loki in the series. Marvel/Disney+Will we see the hopelessly bureaucratic Time Variance Authority, an organization that polices time travel to prevent branching timelines, show up to bust some time travelers in “Multiverse of Madness”? The stand-alone “Loki” series, which takes place in an alternate M.C.U. timeline, also explains the idea of variants from different timelines (among them: Richard E. Grant’s Classic Loki and Alligator Loki). More