Long before the MCU was launched and Benedict Cumberbatch was even on the map to play the mighty wizard, there were several attempts to make a movie out of the superhero. One of the longest running attempts at this was a collaboration between Sandman creator Neil Gaiman and none other than Guillermo del Toro. It was during an interview on the Happy, Sad, Confused podcast with Josh Horowitz that Gaiman went into detail about the long-unknown production and had this to say.
"Kevin and I have spoken a few times over the years on things. The only one that I wish, although, odds are probably, I think the way they did it commercially was better than...but I remember back in 2007, having minimalistic conversations with Kevin Feige about 'What about Doctor Strange?' Then talking to Guillermo Del Toro, and Guillermo and I having these ideas about Doctor Strange and starting the beginning, me starting the beginning of the conversation with Kevin about 'I could do Doctor Strange with Guillermo.' And basically, they said 'We just want to concentrate on the core characters right now.
Doctor Strange is way up the line, we don't want to go there.' There were some cool things in it. My favorite Doctor Strange thing was the idea of...the one thing that we really wanted to do was have his adventures, have him become an alcoholic and a disbarred physician, all that sort of stuff, happen in the 1920s. So the idea is that, he went though all of that and the training to become the world's greatest magician maybe in the early '30s, late '20s, and he's been living in Greenwich Village for 90 years looking the same in his place, and nobody really notices. We just sort of liked that idea, and he would have been sort of out of time. But other than that, it would have just been very sort of Steve Ditko, because, you know, that's the best."
What do you think a Doctor Strange movie by Gaiman and Del Toro might have been like?