Dr. Strange and the Maybe We Should Have Left the Kids Home

This ain’t the lighthearted superhero fun of Thanos snapping away half the population

Paul A. DeStefano
4 min readMay 5, 2022
Original art by József Kovács from the author’s Riftsiders novel series

I had the opportunity to see an early screening of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Spoiler free: you might want to leave any impressionable little ones home.

If your kids would be bothered by The Walking Dead, they’re not ready for this movie. I won’t mention any specific characters here, to keep everything spoiler free, but I will try to detail a few of the more disturbing scenes and moments, so you can better judge if any of these moments are the type of thing to keep your little Spiderman fan up all night with the light on. The movie is dark. The deaths are gut punches. These are not the somewhat sanitized and abstract deaths that come from Thanos’ snap.

These deaths are largely shot with the camera angle strategically avoiding showing blood. If we saw all the blood, this movie would be a hard R. The deaths are personal, up close and disturbing. The gore, as I mentioned, is mostly bloodless. That said, we do witness quite a few of the most graphically depicted deaths in the Marvel Universe. The creatures and effects are comic book cool and over the top. There’s a surreal craziness and inexplicable dreamlike quality to the mystic arts…

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Paul A. DeStefano

Author, Board Gamer/Designer. Paul D’s Tainted Dragon Inn on FB for geeky stuff. Represented by B Swanson The Purcell Agency. Riftsiders. www.PaulADestefano.com