In an interview with MTV Neil Gaiman admitted that he wanted to do a Dr. Strange movie with director Guillermo del Toro, but noted: “The problem is Guillermo’s off doing The Hobbit, and that’s going to be three, four years in New Zealand for him. And when he comes back he’s going to want to something personal, so he’ll probably do Hellboy 3 before we could ever get to do a Dr. Strange movie.”
Gaiman told MTV that he and del Toro had talked about collaborating on a Dr. Strange movie: “And I think we’d both really like to do a Dr. Strange movie. We’d love to do it together.” Still with del Toro’s schedule, a Dr. Strange movie involving Gaiman and del Toro appears to be at best at least a half decade or more in the future.
Gaiman also expressed approval of the idea of doing a movie based on his Elizabethan Marvel fantasy 1602, something that The Incredible Hulk director Louis Leterrier remains excited about. But Gaiman noted that while the prospects for the project are more realistic now since Marvel is trying to reacquire the screen rights to its properties for Marvel Studios, 1602 would still present major problems since Sony has the rights to Spider-Man (Peter Parquah) and Fox has rights to the X-Men (Carlos Javier). So 1602 on the big screen might prove to be an even more distant dream than a Dr. Strange collaboration between Gaiman and del Toro.