The official trailer for Sam Raimi's Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness arrived in 2022 and announced the MCU's most tonally distinctive entry with a horror sensibility and visual menace that immediately signals the film's ambitions as something unlike anything the franchise had previously attempted. The trailer's most arresting quality is its tone: a Sam Raimi horror aesthetic of real menace and visual strangeness that conveys the film's intentions as a superhero horror film with enough clarity and unease to establish its credentials as something new in the franchise's history. Raimi understood that the film's primary obligation was to make the MCU feel frightening for the first time, and the trailer is built on that understanding with a tonal confidence and visual invention that makes it feel like a creative departure rather than a stylistic affectation. Elizabeth Olsen's Wanda Maximoff is shown with enough physical intensity to establish the character's transformation into the film's primary antagonist, and the multiverse spectacle is conveyed with enough visual scale to establish the film's production ambitions alongside its horror register.
First Impressions
The trailer is the MCU's most unsettling, with Sam Raimi's horror sensibility conveyed through visual imagery of such striking menace that it establishes the film's intentions as something the franchise had never previously produced. Elizabeth Olsen's Wanda is shown with enough ferocity and stillness to establish the character's dramatic potential as a villain, and the trailer identifies the horror register and the multiverse spectacle as the elements that give the film its primary selling points. Raimi is not making a superhero film with horror elements. He is making a horror film with superhero elements, and the trailer makes that distinction feel like the most important creative decision in the MCU's recent history.
What the Trailer Reveals
The trailer establishes the multiverse threat, conveys Wanda's corruption by the Darkhold, and glimpses the film's most spectacular sequences with enough visual clarity to establish its considerable production ambitions. The horror imagery is deployed with enough restraint to generate real unease without revealing the film's most extreme moments, and the trailer pinpoints the combination of Raimi's horror sensibility and the multiverse spectacle as the elements that give the film its distinctive identity. The footage makes clear that Raimi intends to deliver something tonally unlike anything the franchise has previously attempted, which is both the film's most defensible creative decision and the source of its most significant audience division.
Music and Sound
Danny Elfman's score gives the trailer a distinctive and unsettling sonic identity that suits the film's horror ambitions with real precision. The orchestration draws on Elfman's horror film background to produce something unlike anything the MCU had previously offered, immediately establishing Multiverse of Madness as something considerably more tonally adventurous than a conventional superhero sequel. Elfman and Raimi have worked together before, and the collaboration shows: the score sounds like it belongs to a different genre, which is exactly the point.
Most Memorable Moment
The glimpse of Wanda as a horror movie antagonist, shown with enough physical intensity and visual menace to convey the character's remarkable transformation, is the trailer's most purely compelling image: a demonstration of Elizabeth Olsen's commitment to the role and a preview of the film's most frightening sequences. Olsen plays the moment with a stillness that is more unsettling than any amount of visual effects. The camera holds on her face long enough to make the point.
Trailer Verdict
The MCU's most tonally daring trailer, for its most unsettling film. Multiverse of Madness is a film of visual invention and genuine horror ambition, and this trailer captures its Sam Raimi sensibility and multiverse spectacle with a confidence and focus that make it one of the most tonally bold pieces of superhero franchise marketing the genre has produced. Raimi promised something the MCU had never attempted. The trailer made you believe he was the right person to attempt it.