Danny Elfman, a renowned musician and the composer of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, has discussed the last-minute adjustments made to Doctor Strange 2’s most intense fight sequence.

Elfman talked about the “Lethal Symphonies” in the film with Marvel.com:

“When Sam [Raimi] first described it to me, I said to Sam, ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

In order to show Elfman what Raimi had in mind for the Doctor Strange 2 fight scene, the composer claims that Raijmi shot it first. Elfman put it this way:

“Literally, not metaphorically, these notes are flying off the page.”

Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange encounters a different version of himself in a reality that is on the verge of collapsing due to an incursion. During the battle between Doctor Strange and the sinister Sinister Strange, both sorcerers evoke musical notes from the pages scattered around the room. Composing the scene, Elfman said:

“It was working various classical pieces against each other; kind of famous pieces”

“Then, in the very 59th minute of the 11th hour, at the very end, Kevin Feige jumped in and said to just simplify it to Beethoven versus Bach. I did one more pass at it where it was Beethoven’s ‘5th Symphony’ against Bach’s ‘Toccata and Fugue.’ It really worked out perfectly.”

The Importance Of The Lethal Symphonies

Elfman and Raimi reunited for the first time since their collaboration on Liam Neeson’s Darkman in the 1990s on MoM. Since then, Elfman has composed the scores for both of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films and for Oz the Great and Powerful. Additionally, Raimi talked about how important the “Lethal Symphonies” scene was in terms of establishing the scope of magic’s power in the MCU as a whole. Here’s what he said:

“We wanted to do something extraordinary because we had Doctor Strange versus Sinister Strange “We didn’t want them to throw fisticuffs, and we didn’t even want their classic spells against each other. We wanted something that we hadn’t seen before. I thought it would be really cool if they used music as a weapon against each other.”

Benedict Cumberbatch further went on to say:

“There was a point where it became a little bit like a weird tennis match. I was like, ‘No, it’s got to be more inventive. We have to explode it, and we have to use different elements.’ I came up with the ideas of the sound effects, splitting it apart and coming back together. The notes were hitting Sinister Strange like sort of peppering him with bullets, and then there was one note that would go into a ball that’s being held to explode.”

There is a lot of orchestral action to be seen in the film Doctor Strange 2.