Release dates are rarely used to impact stories. A studio wants to release a movie around a certain time of the year because it's a holiday. You can watch Halloween or Christmas movies whenever you want. The release dates of the movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe have a lot to do with the story.
Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness are two movies. The new trailer for Strange clearly shows what the character learns in Spider-Man: No Way Home impacts his journey in his new film. One film cannot happen without the other. That wasn't the case before.
Doctor Strange 2 was supposed to come out before Spider-Man: No Way Home. Doctor Strange 2 and Spider-Man were both scheduled for May 2021. Spider-Man was moved to December and Strange to November, which kept the order intact. Spider-Man was going to come before Doctor Strange. The plots were so intricately connected that it posed a problem.
Chris McKenna told Variety that they were working on a script that incorporated things that were happening in Doctor Strange 2. When we started writing, Strange knew the dangers of messing with these things. He was a person who didn't know much about the multiverse. It is even more frightening to start fooling around with things that are not known. Either way, he was the voice of reason, saying, "You don't mess with the fate of an individual" and Peter was naive enough to say, "Why not?" Why can't we save them?
They flipped it and it was history. Spider-Man: No Way Home is one of the biggest hits in recent Hollywood memory and has become an even better lead-in to the Strange sequel. You have to wonder if No Way Home would have been different if Strange had already had a multiverse adventure. Would he have made the same mistake? Could he have come up with a better solution? It is fun to think about how a single move on the calendar can change a movie.
