Pay No Attention To That Man…: Dr. Strange Director Announced

So Marvel  Studios has spent a week and a half dealing with the aftermath of Edgar Wright leaving as director of Ant-Man with just over a year to go before the thing opens in theaters. And some of that dealing has been frantically trying to line up a new director for the project before someone gets the genius idea to start lobbying the masses to begin shipping crates of Cornetto ice cream cones to Kevin Feige… but so far, that hasn’t gone so well.

So what do you do if you’ve got a public relations mess, that you can’t solve right away, about a movie currently in production? Well, how about you make a snap announcement about a long-rumored future movie that isn’t currently in production?

To wit:

So if you’re anything like me, you read this Tweet and said, “Huh… Who the fuck is Scott Derrickson?” Well, let’s check the ol’ IMDB entry.

Apparently, Derrickson wrote and directed The Exorcism of Emily Rose (which featured Jennifer Carpenter from Dexter, and which I recall from my cable viewing a couple years back was pretty decent), Sinister (which starred Ethan Hawke, and featured an advertising campaign that made the flick seem like another “white guy fails to leave a haunted house” story), and wrote Urban Legends: Final Cut, otherwise known as The Urban Legends You See At 2 A.M. On SyFy.

So long story short: the dude has a background in horror movies, which makes a lot of sense for a supernatural hero who does battle with a guy who amounts to Satan with Michael Jackson Pepsi head.

But still, I feel bad for the guy. The timing of the announcement makes it feel like a premature announcement to take the heat off of the Ant-Man fiasco. Because absent other context, it just looks like Marvel Studios has chosen a low budget horror director to take on a less-exposed property and is hoping for the best.

Then again, that kind of thinking does seem to have maybe worked at least once so far…