There's a genre of internet video I consider sacred: the low-budget remake. Somebody watches a giant blockbuster and thinks, I could do that with a bedsheet and a birthday cake, and then, crucially, actually does it. The latest entry in the canon is a video about recreating Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness for twenty dollars, cheap props and all, which you can watch via MSN's writeup, and I've now spent more time thinking about it than I've spent thinking about the actual movie.

What gets me is the scale mismatch. Doctor Strange 2 is an effects-dense film by any standard. Reality folds like origami. Mirror dimensions shatter into Escher staircases. Whatever the final budget was, and nobody's confirming it here, it was the kind of number that buys houses. And somebody with twenty bucks and a pile of homemade props looked at all that and said, sure.

The charm of these remakes isn't that they're good. Some shots land eerily well; most are gloriously, deliberately terrible in a way that feels like love. Cheap capes standing in for the Cloak of Levitation. Cardboard sanctums. Chaos magic approximated with, I'd wager, a laser pointer and a willingness to commit. The whole form works because the makers understand the original deeply enough to parody its grammar shot by shot, which is a kind of scholarship. You can't lovingly recreate something you don't know frame by frame. Bad imitations come from shallow knowledge. Great bad imitations come from obsession.

And the multiverse might be the perfect target for this treatment, because the concept itself is already about cheap doubling. Once your plot mechanism is 'there is another version of everything,' the gap between a studio VFX house rendering an alternate New York and a guy filming his friend in a different hat collapses entirely. Same story, different budget. The remake mostly just reveals that the movie's skeleton is simple enough to carry on twenty dollars and enthusiasm.

There's a lineage here, too, and I fell into it at 2 AM the way I fall into everything. The modern form basically descends from a Mississippi project that began in 1982, when Chris Strompolos, Eric Zala, and Jayson Lamb set out to remake Raiders of the Lost Ark with their friends over roughly seven years, on bicycles, with a mud pit standing in for the Cairo dig. That project became a legend, then a documentary, then careers. The lesson it taught a generation of weirdos with cameras was that spectacle was never the point. Timing and blocking were the point. A whip made of rope cuts to the same rhythm as a whip made of CGI.

I keep thinking about what the $20 figure actually represents, because it's the whole thesis of the form compressed into a price tag. Not $2,000, which would suggest real equipment. Not $5, which would suggest a hoax of asceticism. Twenty dollars is gas money and a thrift store cape. That's the budget of a person who decided the barrier to making movies was never money, it was permission, and permission turned out to be something you could just give yourself.

Whatever the original cost, it cost an absurd multiple of twenty dollars. I've rewatched the remake video twice and the original once. Make of that what you will, but the multiverse might be trying to tell us something about where the actual magic lives: in the basement, with the cardboard, where the only budget line item is someone's Saturday.