Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)

Six years after its release, Scott Derrickson’s Doctor Strange remains one of the best Marvel movies, and certainly one of the only cinematically interesting installments. In a franchise replete with visually dull, generic action sequences, Derrickson and company crafted a unique, kaleidoscopic visual vocabulary to express the reality-bending power of sorcery. They also gave the Marvel Cinematic Universe its best redemption-arc origin story since the original Iron Man — and, in a plot fraught with genuinely ambiguous moral and spiritual themes, set the stage for possibly the most thoughtful and interesting villain in MCU history.

There’s a scene in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in which Doctor Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) hastily explains about Karl Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor), his former ally turned mortal enemy, to a young newcomer named America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez). The catch is, they’re in another dimension of the multiverse, and the Mordo before them is not our Mordo. Our Mordo — the Mordo who said “I will follow this path no longer” and, in an ominous post-credits sequence, ambushed a paraplegic and stole the magic he used to walk, declaring that there were “too many sorcerers” in the world — isn’t in this film. So far as I know, he hasn’t been seen since that post-credits sequence.