Does Wanda die in Doctor Strange 2? The movie’s writer explains

Instantly after Physician Unusual within the Multiverse of Insanity premiered, some followers began rebelling over among the movie’s greatest plot factors, notably the ending. Main modifications to a well-known character will try this. Inevitably, theories and protests began flying, and the destiny of the film’s villain sparked instant on-line arguments, hypotheses, and hopes. Polygon lately spoke with the movie’s screenwriter, Michael Waldron, additionally a author and producer on the Marvel Studios sequence Loki and on Rick and Morty. We requested him two of the questions which have come up most on the web because the Physician Unusual sequel premiered — particularly about Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch.

[Ed. note: Major plot spoilers and ending spoilers ahead for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.]

Photograph: Jay Maidment/Marvel Studios

Some followers bridled on the reveal that occurs early within the first act of Multiverse of Insanity — Wanda, recent off a brand new trauma and a life-changing expertise together with her two seemingly imaginary youngsters in WandaVision, winds up being the movie’s villain. She’s obsessive about utilizing the potential of the multiverse to discover a world the place her youngsters are actual and alive, and he or she’s keen to kill anybody who will get in the best way of that aim. By the tip of the film, although, she has a second of remorse and readability, and he or she appears to take her personal life whereas destroying a web site that gave her immense energy.

Followers don’t essentially need to consider Wanda’s useless, although. Is she? Waldron says he actually couldn’t say for positive.

“I can’t,” he tells us. “I hope she isn’t, however I don’t know. A large mountain fell on her, however she’s fairly sturdy. So I suppose I don’t know. Time will inform. However as a fan of Wanda and Lizzie [actor Elizabeth Olsen], I’d positive wish to see her once more.”

That hedging is comprehensible, provided that even when Waldron’s script definitively mentioned “Wanda Maximoff dies and is completely really useless, perpetually,” superhero tales have a long-standing behavior of discovering methods to resurrect the useless. On this case, Wanda could be impervious sufficient to outlive the deliberate collapse of Wundagore Mountain — notably given her reality-altering powers, and the sheer quantity of bodily harm she takes and shakes off all through the movie. Or the MCU might simply exchange her with a special Wanda from one other a part of the multiverse, probably one who didn’t expertise the identical traumas and would allow completely different sorts of tales.

Waldron says it is smart that followers could be spinning out these sorts of theories and hopes for the longer term, slightly than taking Wanda’s obvious on-screen demise actually. “I suppose it’s pure, proper?” he says. “I imply, I’ve been a fan of issues, and wished issues to occur otherwise. However that doesn’t imply I didn’t get the best ending. It in the end simply implies that what I watched made me really feel one thing strongly, which is a hit in itself.”

Waldron says fan resistance to dramatic character change or demise is inevitable. “Whenever you make one thing for such a large viewers, the responses are going to completely run the gamut of thrilled to devastated with among the selections you’ve made,” he says. “And that’s what you join while you make an MCU film. However you’ll be able to’t let that scare you from making daring storytelling selections. In any other case you gained’t make something fascinating.”

He provides that not one of the responses have actually bothered him: “You’re glad folks care.”

One of many “daring storytelling selections” he’s referencing is making Wanda into an outright mass assassin. She kills heroes with out guilt or hesitation all through the film, and spends most of its run time making an attempt to homicide America Chavez, a young person whose multiverse-jumping powers Wanda plans to steal for herself. Followers of the character have understandably been offended, each as a result of she falls so uncharacteristically far into egocentric, outright evil selections, and since her motivations — doing all of it for her children — match right into a long-time stereotype the place feminine characters are too typically centered solely on their youngsters.

Picture: Marvel Studios

“Nicely, I get it. I get them being offended,” Waldron says. “It bums me out too that she does these issues. As the author, what I needed to do was perceive, Is that this one thing she might do? Does it make sense for this character, and for all of us? This was a choice not made frivolously, to make Wanda the antagonist of this movie.”

That mentioned, Waldron says he felt the choice was well-grounded within the story Marvel motion pictures have been telling about Wanda for the previous a number of years. “Given the journey she’d been on, given the enormity of her trauma, of her grief, given the occasions of WandaVision, culminating together with her buying the Darkhold and studying about her future because the Scarlet Witch, I believe that after she opened that e book, and that e book began whispering to her concerning the fact that her children had been on the market, that was sufficient,” he says. “That was sufficient to push her over to the sting.”

“After which she’s pushed even additional by Unusual, and by everyone else. You hear her calling out their hypocrisies — You do the identical, you break the foundations and turn out to be a hero; I do it and I’m the enemy. By the tip, I felt like, Yeah, this can be a justifiable choice. It’s one we collaborated on with Lizzie. And he or she definitely sells it, and is such an amazing actor that it simply felt like we might do it. And I’m glad we did. It’s a variety of enjoyable, and I believe it’s a strong step for the character.”