‘Avengers: Secret Wars’ Lands ‘Doctor Strange 2’ Screenwriter Michael Waldron

Adam B. Vary
·2 min read
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Marvel Studios is one step closer to “Secret Wars.” The company has tapped “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” screenwriter Michael Waldron to write the script for 2025’s “Avengers: Secret Wars,” the climactic final film in the Multiverse Saga.

Waldron has been instrumental in crafting the multiverse within the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He created and served as head writer on the 2021 Disney+ series “Loki,” in which the single, sacred Marvel timeline was ultimately fractured into a multiplicity of alternative realities. In “Doctor Strange 2,” Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) encounters several new dimensions, and in the film’s mid-credits scene, he meets Clea (Charlize Theron), a sorcerer from the Dark Dimension who tells Strange that his multiverse-hopping adventures have caused an “incursion.”

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That word was an immediate dog whistle to fans of the 2015 “Secret Wars” storyline in the Marvel comics. In the series, the main Marvel universe and the Ultimate Marvel universe collide in an incursion, causing both to collapse and form a brand new reality called Battleworld, a dystopian nightmare filled with several alternate versions of many Marvel characters. If the “Secret Wars” comes anywhere close to that storyline, it follows that Marvel would task Waldron with cleaning up the narrative mischief he helped create with “Loki” and “Doctor Strange 2.”

Prior to his work with Marvel, Waldron was a writer on “Rick & Morty” and “Community,” and he created the 2021 Starz pro-wrestling drama “Heels.” He’s also been hired by Lucasfilm to work with Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige on a possible “Star Wars” movie. In May, Waldron told Variety that he was “writing away” on the script for that film. “I’m enjoying having the freedom on that to do something that’s not necessarily a sequel or anything,” he said. “It just doesn’t have a bunch of TV shows and movies that you’re servicing on top of it, the way I did with ‘Doctor Strange.'”

With “Secret Wars,” the opposite is true: Waldron will be tying together at least 37 titles in film and streaming within the Multiverse Saga.

Deadline first broke the news.

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