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 the superb Paul Cemmick illustration, above.
“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!”
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