Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness introduced and dispatched a version of the Illuminati in gruesome fashion, with decapitations, broken necks, and the “spaghetti-ing” of Mr. Fantastic. However, the first shocking dispatch came to Inhumans leader Black Bolt, played by Anson Mount, who found that he didn’t have the brain to deal with Wanda – so she crushed it using his own powers. While the scene was over very quickly, ILM Visual Effects supervisor Julian Foddy recently revealed to befores & afters that a lot of effort went into creating the horrifying death.
"For Black Bolt, it starts off with Wanda sealing his mouth shut, or rather 'removing' his mouth all together. That was a CG patch that we created using the texture photography from the actor. Then to create the sonic blast that bounces back into his head, and effectively scrambles his brain, before blowing the back of his skull off, the way we approached that was to almost do it for real. We also looked at human faces in wind tunnels and the amount of ripple it does to your cheeks. We found that it was impossible to sim that and get realistic results at 24 frames a second. So the FX team, instead, stretched out the timeline in Houdini and worked at something like 120 frames a second."
Despite there being a lot of work behind the scenes to make Black Bolt’s death work, Foddy was more than happy with the end result, especially as the sound department added a little something extra he was not privy to while crafting the effects. He added:
"I think it was definitely a task worth doing, it really gives some interesting and gruesome results, and hats off to Skywalker Sound for adding that kind of squelch noise, which none of us had heard until we saw it in the cinema. That's the icing on the cake, just to really up the 'ooh' factor."
Doctor Strange 2 Arrived On Disney+ Last Month
Having made a sizable impact in cinemas as Marvel Studios’ first movie release of 2022, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness arrived on Disney+ in June and became a huge crown puller all over again. The film surpassed the streaming debut of Eternals and continued the success of the MCU alongside a number of popular TV series such as Moon Knight, which also explored a darker side of the MCU.
While Doctor Strange will return again in a third solo movie, there is currently no word on exactly when that could be. It took six years to deliver the Strange sequel, and Covid delays aside, the growing roster of Marvel heroes makes it almost impossible for sequels to roll out any quicker. With Kevin Feige set to make a big Marvel Studios announcement in the next few months, we will soon discover exactly what the immediate future holds for the heroes of Earth-616 and beyond, but in the meantime, fans are preparing themselves for the arrival of Thor: Love and Thunder in theaters this week.