For Sam Raimi, the final weeks of making his first superhero movie since he helped kick-start the genre’s modern era with his Spider-Man trilogy are pure multitasking madness. From his home in Los Angeles, the director is working on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in three places at once — virtually watching over composer Danny Elfman laying down a score with an orchestra at Abbey Road Studios in London, while also listening in on actors rerecording dialogue, and supervising the movie’s sound mix. 

It all fits with a process that also had screenwriter Michael Waldron (who brought a deft comic touch to the Disney+ show Loki) finishing the screenplay while Raimi was in the process of shooting the movie. He’d taken over the project after Scott Derrickson, who directed the first Doctor Strange in 2016, exited the sequel, citing “creative differences”; with a script to redo and a shooting deadline already in place, Raimi was behind schedule before he’d even started.