Roman Coppola, the son of famed director Franchis Ford Coppola revealed in a recent interview that twenty years ago he almost made a big screen adaptation of Doctor Strange for Marvel. While he was developing the film for Marvel their reputation was being shredded in a garbage disposal because of the terrible films that they were pumping out at the time. Roman ended up dropping out of the production because he didn't want to be tied down to the limitations of the studio system and it died. It's a shame, because the fact he wanted to make an accurate version of the story for the big screen could have been awesome. Here's what he had to say in the interview with MoviePilot,
You know, I did [have the desire to make a superhero movie], but I could again. I was a huge comic book fan growing up, within reason. I was a fan of Spider-Man and all that stuff. Actually, I met Stan Lee 15 or 20 years ago when Marvel had the worst reputation for their adaptations. They had made a really terrible 'Fantastic Four' movie and some other things. I met him with my dad and we said, 'Oh, wow, I wish we could be involved. How great would it be to make a really accurate version of one of these films?' I had the aspirations to make a 'Doctor Strange' movie, which I worked on quite a bit. I ended up coming out on the other side, since I told someone I was working on a comic book movie and they said, 'Do you really want to work for a studio to get pushed around for three years and not make something that's personal?' To make a movie like that where I could really use my sensibility would be fantastic. That type of work now is a product, and there's a manner in which it's made. Now I think it'd be better to spend those three years to do something better.
Who knows, there's a chance that this could have been the first great film from Marvel. As for the Doctor Strange movie being developed by Marvel now, we haven't really heard anything since Thomas Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer (Conan The Barbarian, Sahara) turned in a draft of the script back in 2011.
I'm a huge fan of Doctor Strange, and I can't wait to see the movie get made! Hopefully it will be sooner rather than later. Would you have liked to see Coppola direct a Doctor Strange movie?