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

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, as we’ve seen in prior appearances of Marvel sorcerers. This extends to the… strange… critters, creatures and ghostly monsters throughout.

If you have a kid susceptible to nightmares, this ain’t for them. For the right kid, this movie is a rollercoaster of crazy. For the wrong kid, this will lead to those discussions in twenty years of “you know what movie really scared the crap out of me and screwed me up when I was a kid…” I’m going to go into a little more detail now, so if your kid is specifically freaked out by something, you can judge for yourself. I don’t know your kid. Figure out what may keep your kid up at night.

Okay. Here we go.

If you don’t want spoilers, I say again, use The Walking Dead as your metric. If that’s too much for your kid, this is too much for your kid.

Spoiler warning.