Stan Lee, Alex Cox And The Doctor Strange Movie That Never Was

In 1989, Marvel's main man and the Sid & Nancy director teamed-up to make a film about the Sorcerer Supreme...

A version of this article appeared in SFX, as did Paul Cemmick’s ace illustration.

“I was in demand in the 1980s!” laughs writer-director Alex Cox. The man responsible for such cult classics as Repo Man and Sid & Nancy is famous for having never courted Hollywood. But having made a big noise with his breakthrough movies, the Liverpudlian was finding it tough to turn away the majors.

“There were all sorts of things being talked about around that time,” Cox continues.
“I was on the shortlist for RoboCop and its sequel. And someone- I’m not sure who - thought I was the right person to shoot the Chevy Chase/Steve Martin/Martin Short comedy Three Amigos. I can only imagine it was someone who’d heard that Repo Man was a comedy but hadn’t gone to the trouble of seeing the film.”

Cox, however, had no interest in dancing to Hollywood’s tune. “I wanted to initiate my own projects. Someone - again I don’t remember who it was - told me that Francis Ford Coppola’s company American Zoetrope had a deal with Marvel to develop some scripts. So I approached them… with the idea of doing Doctor Strange!”

Amongst Marvel’s most enigmatic creations, Doctor Steven Strange is just the sort of figure you can imagine Alex Cox being a fan of. “Strange is an amazing character,” enthuses Cox. “I’d been a big comic book fan growing up, although to be completely frank, I preferred DC to Marvel. Later on, I came to like the San Francisco underground comix. But it was Strange who really captured my imagination.

“What’s so compelling about him is that he has absolutely no super powers - just magic. It also didn’t hurt that he was co-created by Steve Ditko - the greatest of all comic book artists… well, equal greatest along with Wally Wood [whose Mars Attacks! trading cards Cox used as the basis for another unproduced screenplay].”

And if being hired to write a script about his favourite hero wasn’t wonderful enough, the chance to collaborate with a childhood hero further enhanced the deal. “Stan is The Man,” continues the incredibly affable Cox. “Stan Lee is every big as amiable as he seems in interviews. And not only is he very nice but he’s always optimistic which is an astonishingly rare quality in the entertainment business. It didn’t take many years of filmmaking for my optimism levels to drop but Stan still has the ability to always expect the best. It’s a great thing, but then he’s a great man.”

So, true believers, it came to pass that Stan Lee and Alex Cox set to work on their Doctor Strange screenplay. As our man recalls, “We wrote most of the script at Stan’s house. I’d drive over most mornings and we’d chat - Stan loves to chat - and we’d sit around and we’d make each other laugh and we’d come up with outlandish ideas.

“But Stan had all these other obligations, including writing the daily Spider-Man strip that ran in the papers back then, so there were times when I was on my own. Ours was a wholly original story, although there were old favourites like Dormammu and Baron Mordo in the mix.

“Of course, when he wasn’t around, Stan left instructions about how the script should develop. According to his instructions, the finale was to be an epic showdown on Easter Island. Do I think we would have been allowed to film there? Probably not, but Stan Lee didn’t get where he is in the world without thinking really, really big.”

With Strange being developed by Francis Coppola’s mini-studio, you could be forgiven for thinking the Godfather director might have had designs on the good doctor. Cox, however, is in no doubt that he rather than the creator of Apocalypse Now would’ve been in charge of the behind-the-camera activities. “I brought Strange to American Zoetrope as a film I would direct - I was up front about that.”

However, had the picture got the green light, it’s possible another member of the Clan Coppola might have snagged the starring role. “They - they being American Zoetrope - talked about asking Francis’s nephew Nic Cage to play Steven Strange,” says Alex with a sigh. “But like everything else, nothing came of it.”

So why has the world been denied a big-screen Doctor Strange? With other Marvel properties, principally The Incredible Hulk, having enjoyed success on television in the 1970s, there was certainly a market for Marvel-inspired entertainment. And while the cost and limitations of special effects might have made certain entitles hard to realise - say, The Uncanny X-Men - it surely wouldn’t have been that hard to breathe life into the Sorcerer Supreme?

As modest as he is pessimistic, Alex Cox believes that it was his involvement that spelt doom for the screenplay. “I was attached to it as director so that surely killed it as far as getting studio money was concerned!

“But I think the fact that nobdoy’s made a Doctor Strange movie suebsequently might have to do with Steven Strange being a with - or, rather, a warlock: a master of black magic and the mustic arts. The studios are always looking over their shoulder at the fundamentalist right wing, and a movie about a black magician might be a little bit too much or them.”

Whether or not Alex is correct about a potential Christian backlash, there certainly seems to be ome kind of hex on Doctor Strange: The Movie. Even before our heroes got to work, Bob Gale was asked to pen a Strange script following the success of the first Back To The Future. And in the years since, everyone from Wes Craven to Guillermo del Toto has been attached to a script about the sorcerer at one time or another. But while there has been a - terrible - TV movie, a cartoon series and a feature-length animation, a live action feature remains elusive.

If his dream of bringing Doctor Strange to the screen never came to fruition, Alex Cox’s comic book fantasies didn’t die with the project. “I wrote four Godzilla comics in the 1990s,” he beams with understandable pride. “I’d been working in Japan shooting a TV show and word got around that I was a fan of monster comics and I was offered the gig. For someone who pawed over comics throughout his childhood, it really was a dream come true."

“And now I’m making a living as an illustrator - I’ve just completed by first book, Three Dead Princes, which is a children’s story written by Danbert Nobacon of Chumbawamaba infamy. A strange career, you say? Well maybe, but then I’ve never thought of myself as having anything as respectable as a career.”