If you haven’t seen Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness, I’m not sure why you’d be reading about alternate endings, but just in case – Spoiler Warning?
If you have seen the film in theaters or on Disney+ you know how it ends. They save the day, Stephen gets closure, then he gets a third eye, and then he gets a Clea (Charlize Theron).
However, it’s now been revealed in the Disney+ commentary that the original plan was to go in a different direction. In the commentary, writer Michael Waldron described a much different ending where Dr. Strange never actually made it home.
“Strange gets trapped in that [incursion] universe and then [Sinister Strange] turns around, and the third eye opens.” The moment is then punctuated by the famous laugh of horror icon Vincent Price that is most famous from when it was used at the end of the famous Michael Jackson Thriller music video.
That means Stephen doesn’t go home, he doesn’t meet Clea, and the path for a third film takes an even darker turn. Some people think they changed it because having him caught in an alternate reality was too close to how season one of Loki ended. Others think it could have more to do with the fact that this film was supposed to come out before Spider-Man: No Way Home, but it ended up coming out several months later.
We think it’s more the latter. If he was supposed to be trapped in an alternate universe during the events of No Way Home, it would explain why he was being such an idiot, castings spells like he was in that film. It means that we probably weren’t even seeing our Dr. Strange in Spider-Man, but a whole other alternate.