Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness: What’s hidden in plain sight in the trailers

Multiverse of Madness is also a sequel to What If…?

There are also several nods to another Disney+ series from last year, too within Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness: the animated anthology, What If…? More specifically to episode four, “What If… Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands?”

There are multiple images of what appears to be New York City slowly dissolving along with a loss of gravity, very much like what happened towards the end of that episode of What If…? where Strange Supreme (Benedict Cumberbatch) ended up destroying his reality. It even looks as though the MCU Doctor Strange will come face-to-face with his evil counterpart from that episode.

That isn’t the only episode of What If…? that’s being referenced though. We’ve seen a few shots of a zombie version of Doctor Strange, though whether that’s the result of some sort of spell or it’s the Doctor Strange from the Marvel Zombies episode of What If…? remains to be seen.

There’s also a rumor that Hayley Atwell will appear as a live-action version of Captain Carter. You can even see Carter’s vibranium shield in the official Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness poster if you take a closer look.

There’s also an appearance of a cyclopean, tentacled eldritch abomination dubbed Gargantos. And we certainly saw our share of tentacles monsters from beyond the boundaries of reality trying to reach into other realities during What If…? didn’t we?

Of course, Gargantos looks, for all appearances, exactly like Shuma-Gorath whereas, in the original comics, Gargantos looked more like a one-eyed octopus and not a demon at all. That’s because Marvel doesn’t hold the full copyright to the Shuma-Gorath name as the character was first referenced in the short story, “The Curse of the Golden Skull” by Robert E. Howard, the creator of Solomon Kane, Kull of Atlantis, and, of course, Conan the Barbarian.