By Phil de Semlyen | Posted 26 Apr 2016

A reshuffle from the Marvel brains trust has seen The Inhumans sent back into movie limbo, but all’s well at the business end of the Phase Three of the MCU. Captain America: Civil War lands next week, with Doctor Strange following soon after. The two prime forces behind it, Benedict Cumberbatch and director Scott Derrickson, are promising something we haven’t seen before.

“It’s a very different feel, different hero and different set of circumstances to what we’ve seen before,” Cumberbatch tells Empire in the new issue. “It’s another moment during Marvel’s evolution.”

His director, a long-time Doctor Strange fanboy, promises to push Marvel’s creative and visual palate in whole new directions. “We felt free to go as far as we could imagine,” he expands, “so we’re doing a lot of things that I think have not been done before. Once we’d crossed a certain line we just kept going.”

The marriage of the man behind Sinister with this mystical realms of the Sorcerer Supreme has so far yielded a trailer charting his fateful encounter with The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton). The visuals echo some of Inception’s most out-there sci-fi beats, while the early arc of New York surgeon Stephen Strange is laid out clearly for the newbie: he was rich and arrogant, then he became seriously powerful and learnt humility. Then he meets Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Baron Mordo and… well, we’ll have to wait and see.

Doctor Strange wafts magically onto UK screens on October 28, 2016, with Mads Mikkelsen and Rachel McAdams also aboard. Empire magazine, complete with its Stephen Strange coverage, does likewise on your local newsagent’s shelves on April 28. Find out what’s in it right here.