“The multiverse is something we know frighteningly little about,” Doctor Strange said during Spider-Man: No Way Home. Ironically in another reality, where COVID-19 wasn’t a thing, cinemas didn’t close down and movie schedules weren’t disrupted, Marvel fans would have seen Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness a whole two months before Tom Holland’s third solo outing as Peter Parker hit theaters and he would have had a much better idea of the dangers of the multiverse. According to the writers of Spider-Man: No Way Home, the delays in the Doctor Strange sequel meant that a number of changes had to be made to the script due to both films being so intricately linked, and that included just how much the former Sorcerer Supreme knew about the Multiverse.

Marvel Studios has had to make a number of changes to their upcoming release slate, and thanks to certain circumstances, there have been some projects that have released earlier or later than they were originally intended. This included Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier revealing its post credit scene before that of Black Widow, which both involved the appearance of Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) as she seemingly began recruiting John Walker and Yelena Belova to an end that has yet to be fully revealed, and Hawkeye’s look at the Statue of Liberty sporting Captain America’s shield arriving just before Spider-Man: No Way Home features the same thing in construction a couple of weeks later.

In the original Marvel slate prior to the COVID-19 delays, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was set to arrive in cinemas in May 2021, with Spider-Man: No Way Home arriving two months later. Obviously we now know that in its current form, Spider-Man’s latest adventure wouldn’t sit right having debuted before Doctor Strange’s horror-themed film, so there had to be changes made to keep that well known Marvel continuity in order, as was explained by Chris McKenna in an interview with Variety.

“We were actually working off of things that were happening in ‘Doctor Strange 2,’ and trying to incorporate them into our script. When we started writing, [Strange] knows firsthand the dangers of screwing with these things," he explained. "Then we changed it so he was a person who doesn’t know that much about the multiverse. But that makes it even more frightening, to start fooling around with these things, because it’s the fear of the unknown. Either way, he was the voice of reason going, ‘You don’t mess with the fate of an individual’ — and Peter Parker being naive enough to go, ‘Why not? Why can’t we save these people?'”

While there were no further details given on how else Spider-Man’s story could have been different to the version we now have, it is hard to see how it could have been made better. What is possibly more important is that the hype of Spider-Man will certainly help boost Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in a way that would not have happened if the movies had been released in their original intended order.