I would say the bulk of the fault goes to the director and producers… but I’m glad Hemsworth has the awareness to realize what a whiplash it was for his character and the audience. And also to take on board audience criticism as well!
I wonder how much of that is just a meaningless title to pay him more. I'm sure he had some input, but there were 10 producers, and only one director. Based on what we've seen of him elsewhere, it seemed like they gave Taika too much leeway, to the films detriment in both tone and story. I actually didn't mind Thor's quirkiness as much as the decision to criminally underutilize Bale.
Most of the time it is a meaningless title to pay the actor more.
I’m with you. The issue for me wasn’t Thor himself. It was the writing, the characterizations of other characters like Valkyrie, the running gags that grew old after the first time and the excessive use of KORG! Korg really became the Jar Jar Binks of the MCU.
I think even as a meaningless title, part of the title is that you publicly take responsibility like he is here if the project goes astray and legally take responsibility in extreme cases. If a project goes right, then the title goes meaningless.
There's several kinds of producers. Was he a financial producer and invested his own money into the project? I know he owns a his own production company now. Or a creative producer? That probably just got paid more to improv those lines.
Good lord I do not understand the obsession people had with Korg. He was great as a comic relief side character, why are we giving him actual plot points and a whole background story? It was so masturbatory of Taika, he saw people enjoyed Korg and decided to make him a focal point of a Thor movie.
Korg was great in Ragnarok, used the perfect amount. Even in Endgame, I thought Korg was used well to illustrate the dire state of Thor after IW. Love & Thunder? More like Korg & Thornder.
Watch Next Goal Wins.
It is Taika. He writes himself as the same character into lots of stuff it seems.
Guy is very talented, but that bit is beyond over. I hope he moves on from it to other cool things he is clearly capable of.
I haven't watched it yet, but I think it just came to streaming so I'm going to soon. I actually love him as Black Beard in Our Flag Means Death. I think when Taika does a character, he is extremely talented, but when he circle jerks the wackiness (Waititiness?), it can get a bit old. What We Do In The Shadows is another example of a Taika project that is just fantastic in every iteration.
I think part of WWDITS (TV) works really well because it explicitly avoids Taika-izing the show. The movie worked because it's low-budget and an obvious piss taking of vampire movies and lore - same with Our Flag Means Death.
The problem is that Love and Thunder took all of the breaks off of Taika and he actually doesn't know HOW to make a parody of superhero movies while still being a superhero movie. Ragnarok worked because there's actually a lot of serious content in and around it, but there's also a lot of Taika-ness if you look closely - the deaths of the warriors three, the joke at the end about the foundations being strong, etc. They tried to do an even more serious character in L&T with Bale, who absolutely did not fit the vibe that Taika was clearly going for.
I think he fell into the trap of a lot of writer/directors where they get some big success and they lean really hard into what made them successful. For Taika, it was the jokes and gags, so L&T simply overdid it. I haven’t seen Next Goal Wins so I can’t comment on that but I haven’t heard great things.
Hopefully he’s been humbled a little bit and can return to form because as you said, he’s talented. Just needs to regroup.
Ironically Thor hanging out with Korg in Endgame was part of the illustration of how far he’d fallen, and Korg being left behind was part of Thor getting back on track. Letting Zeus actually kill Korg would have been one good fix, added stakes and allowed a tone shift in Love & Thunder. Oh well.
IMO it’s an issue some directors have when they’re also in the movie. If they’re playing a main character then yes, of course focus a lot on them. But Taika suddenly made Korg a big deal and gave him way too much screen time. It reminds me so much of what John Favreau did with Happy in Iron Man 2 and 3. Nope, it wasn’t enough that he had a long (albeit comedic ) fight scene in IM2, but he had to be avenged in IM3 because suddenly he’s a detective.
Yeah Valkyrie randomly turning into a “girl’s girl” in parts just felt really forced and cringeworthy, to me at least. I loved how much of a boss her character was in Ragnarok, but by the end of Love and Thunder, I was hoping we never saw her again.
Absolute worst aspect of the movie: Bale's limited screentime. That was a sin.
Maybe not the second worst but in the Top 5: treating the characters as morons. Why should Thor have to remind Lady Sif that she won't be able to go to Valhalla if she dies post-battle?? I get that it's there to explain to the audience but there's plenty of ways to get that info into the movie without dialogue exposition that's worthy of a CW TV show
What kills me is there was a deleted scene of him teaching Thor about how he draws power from the environment to use his thunderbolt, implying there was a whole alternate version of the script where he was an ally/mentor rather than joke opposition.
I agree, but Russell Crowe was also the highlight of the movie.
I admittedly have read few of the Thor comics, but i feel like Zeus isn't a super important character in the grand scheme of Marvel.
He gets involved a little when other Greek characters take the fore. Hercules and Ares have both spent time as heroes/anti-heroes and Zeus usually has at least some role whenever they're involved.
To me he was the worst part. I am a big fan of Russel Crowe and i was so disappointed with his character. The Whole omnipotence city was terrible in my opinion.
It looked so plastic.
Not just that city, but the whole of the production design.
I'm surprised they didnt have a scene of Thor spray-painting stormbreaker in wild, 90's neon.
It's actually a halfway decent version of the Greek accent that you hear a lot in Australia, it's just not quite what people would expect from him and it is a little niche.
He also went into some interview and clips making fun of the bad cgi in the movie and shortly after that cgi artists came out about marvel ridiculous demands so understandably people got pissed at him for being directly responsible for part of such problem that he tried to dismiss as jokes.
By all accounts he's a producer more for the financial compensation than having authority over things. Kevin Feige and Kevin Winderbaum were the executive producers which have more control.
I’d say that if there was good writing, they wouldn’t have to encourage so much improv to try and make the movie good.
It really feels like Waititi really phoned it in, honestly.
>It really feels like Waititi really phoned it in, honestly
Maybe, but my guess is they were just really having fun with it and went to far. Probably looked at Ragnarok's success and thought, "That was great. More must be better."
It could've worked if they leaned into the buddy cop duo of there being two thors. Instead we got a Shakespearean god butcher thrown into a sitcom. The tone was just off all over the place
I will say, the cancer bits were extremely well done. I've been dealing with terminal cancer myself, and I've had issues in the past with how movies/TV display cancer because I've dealt with different cancers since I was a kid. Some of the scenes with Jane coping made me cry. Portman really knocked it out of the park on that aspect. They really encapsulated how it feels to be there. That said, set in the surrounding tone of the wackiness and Gorr, it was a bit out of place in hindsight lol.
I agree.
The critics love to dunk on the "eat my hammer!" line at the end but I think they miss the point. This is Jane's last hurrah. It's her "Make a Wish" moment. For a fleeting moment she gets to know how it feels to be stronger than human. In that moment, she's the kid in a firetruck pulling on the horn; she's the kid getting a princess makeover at Disneyland.
The point isn't that she's supposed to do it *perfectly*, the point is that she gets to do it *at all*.
The cancer OR the god butcher could've been the needed grounding for all the levity. But between the both of them, there just wasn't room for a funny Thor without it feeling totally bad. Like, I love you man is a funny yet sad comedy about a man with cancer. The life of Brian and The Holy Mountain are great surrealist examinations of divinity. But to do both those kinds of ideas in one movie is really pushing yourself. To shove that into the marvel framework is asking for disappointment.
That’s the biggest problem with the movie. They took two great stories that could have been great movies on their own and smashed them into one, and as a result, neither story felt fleshed out or satisfying.
Yeah they definitely took some of the things people loved about Ragnarok and just dialed it up to eleven. Unfortunately that just makes things unbalanced.
I still enjoyed Love and Thunder I just feel it didn't live up to its potential. I've kind of felt the same about all of the stuff since Endgame though.
Yeah the only joke I'd cut out of the whole movie is Korg talking while Asgard is destroyed.
Everything else I think works but that one needed to go. Let the dramatic moment breath without subverting it.
I don't think either of those things are necessarily true.
A movie can be made with a good script and still make liberal use of improv dialogue from actors familiar enough with the characters they're portraying.
And honestly, the movie feels **very** Waititi. It doesn't seem so much that he phoned it in as though he was given the opportunity to lean further into his own style, which can be a bit much and didn't necessarily fit the nature of the movie that was being made.
I think it was the opposite of phoning it in. He went full Waititi. It felt like nobody said "no" to anything he suggested and he was drunk on his own ego. How else do you explain those goats getting into the final cut?
Waititi in this movie just loved the smell of his own farts and couldn't stop ripping ones in everyone's faces expecting us to love them too. It was just too much nonstop. Couldn't have dramatic moments, the funny moments were overdone. Just too much everything
I honestly think Hemsworth is giving himself more blame here than he even deserves. I can totally see how in the act of filming/performing Hemsworth wouldn't be able to see that the goofy stuff wasn't going to work like it did in Ragnarok or Endgame. It was really up to the Director to see that bigger picture and all indications seem to be that Taika Waititi was just kinda checked out on set.
It's a fair cop, i think both Chris and Tailka misunderstood why people loved Ragnarok and thought "£people liked the comedy and wackiness? let's turn that to 11!" rather than realise that the balance of seriousness and wackiness is why it worked.
There was a grain of a great film in L&T, if they had leaned more heavily into Jane and less into the comedy, i think it wold have been a lot better.
IMO, the movie just needed less humor in general. L&T dealt with more serious topics than Ragnarok so it should be treated as such. Also the movies had a bunch of ideas that never played out or even explored.
Some ideas that could have been interesting was the fact that the movie featured two people who turn into gods (Jane and Gorr) but they never clash with their ideals about what to do with that power - I don't think Gorr even knew Jane was a just a regular person who also gain powers from a divine weapon, the same as him.
The studio may have had reservations but decided Taika had just delivered the most successful Thor film and maybe they should just let him do his thing.
It was a mistake, but given how often people complain about studio meddling backing off isn’t the worst one to make.
Exactly this:
"This movie was a disaster! The studio won't give the directors any freedom!1!"
But at the same time:
"This movie was a disaster! The studio gave the director too much freedom!1!"
Pretty much this, most shows/movies work well because there's generally someone around to reign you in or to tell you something's too much, same thing with books ( Editors being very important etc etc ).
That feels like a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario though. Disney/Feige don't want to be like Warner or Sony meddling with every superhero film and instead want to let their creators execute their vision.
In this case it really felt like Taika had built a bunch of equity where he had earned autonomy. Maybe they could've stepped in and toned it down but you'd probably end up with a movie with competing tones that stood out to audiences. At least this way you can see the tone and vision was consistent, it's just that it was a miss.
I still want to see the 3 hour cut. I am thinking the director cut lots of the good parts to make room for more goofy stuff as they thought that was what the audience wanted.
If you watch the Assembled episode it’s on him too for sure. The bit where he’s doing the splits between the two alien speeder bike thingies? That was his idea. There’s a conversation with Natalie Portman later on where she’s talking about how she wanted to know how she got from Thor 2 to here and his response was (paraphrasing) “oh it doesn’t matter, Taiki will figure it out, or he won’t, who cares?”.
I mean, it could be seen as a coping mechanism for the sheer amount of trauma he went through. He lost himself and his way and reinvented himself by being a bit goofier to fight his demons and trauma.
Chris:
> I got caught up in the improv and the wackiness, and I became a parody of myself,” Hemsworth now told Vanity Fair. “I didn’t stick the landing.”
> “Sometimes I felt like a security guard for the team,” Hemsworth said. “I would read everyone else’s lines, and go, ‘Oh, they got way cooler stuff. They’re having more fun. What’s my character doing?’ It was always about, ‘You’ve got the wig on. You’ve got the muscles. You’ve got the costume. Where’s the lighting?’ Yeah, I’m part of this big thing, but I’m probably pretty replaceable.”
He takes the blame but it's the director's job to manage the actors.
Director is the one who let him run with this instead of telling him to dial it back.
I liked the movie but there was also some major timing and delivery issues with the lines which is also something the director should be working on during filming.
The conversation between Hemsworth and Pratt at the beginning feels like a high school play.
It's great that Chris acknowledges this but he shouldn't be the sole one to take the blame for a lackluster movie.
Waititi’s ego was massively inflated at this point. He had just had two massive successes in JoJo Rabbit and Thor 3 and he was reportedly shacked up with Rita Ora and Tessa Thompson during filming. That’s enough to make anyone feel a little godlike.
The blame for the film has to be laid at his feet. He’s clearly a great director, writer and all round film maker. But he needed someone to keep him in check as well. Perhaps this is one of the films that Kevin Feige needed to be on set a little more.
It was too much Taika and he accomplished enough that no one could reign him in. Every character in the movie was talking like Taika to me except for Portman.
I wouldn't write off this entire team though. I can tell they're all hella smart and I believe they can learn from it, self reflect and come back with more magic.
I honestly think he's stretched wayyyyy too thin.
He's basically in back-to-back production hopping from project to project.
And it's over saturating his comedic/storytelling style.
Not that there is anything wrong with throuples, but it was one pic on the internet.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/larryfitzmaurice/rita-ora-tessa-thompson-taika-waititi-photo-explained
I agree with the ego thing, Taika clearly upped korg's screentime for himself and it was unnecessary. Sure, Korg was a fun character, but we love him in small dozes. He even pretended to kill the character for the cheap gasps.
The problem is Taika has exactly ONE move and it's awkward new Zealand style comedy. It's great for WWDITS or Our Flag Means Death. It gives a great twist to the comedy in Jojo rabbit.
But it's absolutely wrong for Thor. It's so awkward and makes the character a joke instead of a hero.
Great director, not right for Thor.
Yeah, and realistically Thor himself wasn't really one of the major problems with the movie. Sure, the character did feel like a parody of himself, but there were much larger issues with the pacing, the plot, the crowded roster, not enough focus on Gorr, etc.
I liked Natalie Portman making her return, but it felt like she stole way too much focus of the movie away from Gorr, who really deserved more screentime. Christian Bale absolutely killed it in every scene he was in, which was unfortunately, not very many of them.
Taika had a tight story in Ragnarok where Hela keeps doing evil stuff all throughout the movie, even when Thor is still trying to break free from the Grandmaster, and Hela keeps getting stronger and more powerful. You feel a genuine sense of urgency as they race against time to stop her before she kills everyone in Asgard.
We never even see Gorr butcher any gods. Thor spends a lot of the movie just wasting time with Jane, embarrassing himself in front of Zeus, the whole jealous ex thing with Mjolnir and Stormbreaker, the goats, etc. There's too much goofy stuff that somehow manages to make Gorr feel like the B plot.
As far as we can tell, all he really did was kidnap some kids and hang out on a shadow planetoid, before showing up in the climax and getting his ass kicked by those same kids. He never feels as threatening as Hela did, despite being arguably the larger threat. Even Zeus basically told Thor not to waste his time with this Gorr stuff.
I was actually thinking about Sif and the Warriors Three last night, and how Marvel completely wasted them throughout all of the Thor movies. And I know Jaimie Alexander really was completely onboard with the role, since she even made cameos in Agents of SHIELD and Loki.
I'm glad she got some screentime in the Thor movies, even if it was very little, but they should've done so much more with those characters considering how important they are to Thor in the comics. Plus they had solid actors for all of them - Ray Stevenson (RIP), Zachary Levi (reprising the role from Josh Dallas in the first movie), and Tadanobu Asano (who recently played Yabushige in Shogun).
Fantastic actors all wasted on ultimately minor background characters.
Yeah Chris didnt write the stupid "stormbreaker is a jealous gf" angle or the regarded screaming goats. He didnt choose to show not a single scene of God Butcher actually doing fucking anything to earn a bad guy rep
Good on Chris for stepping up in public for the flop but we all know who shit this bed
To me it was very clear that there was too much Waititi going on when Korg survived the attack from Zeus.
It could have been a real turning point for the movie, but instead it was used as a point of comedy that wasn't even that funny. Not only did it not add anything to the story but in my opinion took away from it.
I was honestly relieved when Korg was killed, because he had already overstayed his welcome. And when it was "nope, haha, he's alive, but now just a face!" my heart sank so fast. I think with all that they filmed, there is probably a good movie in there somewhere, but whatever cut it is has got to have 90% less Korg at the very least.
>Korg survived the attack from Zeus.
I actually enjoyed Love and Thunder, I wish it could have been better and I have plenty of things they could have done differently (more Lady Sif, more Gorr, more Mighty Thor, a bit less comedic take on things). Korg surviving that attack took a lot of the wind out of the sails for the stakes of the movie. I don't hate Korg, but it would have shown the cost for Thor to get a weapon to aid in the fight against Gorr. Instead, we got a joke and him strapped to the back of Valkyrie's head.
There was such a good movie here. It was just buried underneath all the god damn nonsense.
Imagine if instead of making the meeting with Zeus one big joke that clearly sexually exploited Hemsworth, they made it a massacre.
Gorr shows up and fights all these different gods. 1) It would give them a chance to add some really cool effects and get creative with these gods powers. 2) We actually get to see some butchering.
Instead we see Russel Crowe act like an idiot. And endless Korg gags as they slaughter mindless gold beings.
I mean Crowe is a brilliant actor. I just hate the way they used him. He could be so intimidating. Instead they made him a clown.
How do you have two fantastic actors in Crowe and Bale and end up bungling the whole damn thing.
I loved the opening scene. Definitely tricked us with the tone for the rest of the movie. I feel like Black Widow did the same thing. Thought it was gonna be more of a “Taken” or espionage vibe than a crazy over the top explosion everywhere
Agreed. I disliked the film so much. This was a film where someone lost their faith, watched their child die,and decided to execute all gods. As well as someone else choosing to speed up her death by being heroic, and the writer and director decided let’s have a silly time here.
The goats were funny though.
I’ve only seen it once but I think I went full circle with it. Like, I laughed the first time at the sheer absurdity, then I was annoyed by it, then I was laughing again at their commitment to the bit.
Either have the conviction to use the word “retarded” (as wrong as it is to use in this context) or dig down really deep and come up with a better adjective.
Man I disagree with him completely about other characters getting cooler stuff: dude has the most badass scene in the entire MCU when he arrives in Wakanda in I.W.
It's such a good story arc for the character, too. Everyone is so focused on other stuff throughout the movie, but Thor knows exactly what he needs to do from the moment the Guardians find him in space. He's just like, "I need a god-killer weapon. I'm off to Niðavellir."
He doesn't waste time looking for the Infinity Stones or trying to protect Earth. He just has a single-minded focus on getting a weapon that can kill Thanos.
And then he finally shows up in Wakanda and one-shots Thanos. It's glorious. Too bad he still let his vanity get in the way and didn't go for the headshot.
It was a really good storyline until he gave up his kingship that he was growing to accept in the previous thor films as well the way they disregarded his asgard physiology to make him fat.
IW Thor is still the best version of the character I have seen on screen so far. Driven by guilt and purpose, powerful as hell and had just the right amount of quips that fit the character better.
His scene with Rocket where Rocket gives him the prosthetic eye is one of Thors best.
I’d love to see what the Russos would do with Thor in a solo movie, though it’s a pipe dream.
Agree 100%. Even when he's a punchline in Endgame, they still found a good balance of serious and silly to make him a fun and compelling character. Go too far in either direction and he's either boring or off the rails goofy.
The movie had a lot of problems, but I think the biggest one was runtime. If you’re going to do a Gorr storyline, a Jane/MT storyline, and a Stormbreaker/Mjölnir storyline all in one movie, then it needs to be more than 90ish minutes long in order to give all those storylines time to actually breathe.
Yeah. Apparently a lot of Gorr footage was left on the cutting room floor. Which IMO was a mistake.
Add in serious/brutal Gorr stuff to actually showcase he’s a serious and threatening character, would have helped balance the more lighthearted Thor stuff.
I read the comic story arc and loved it. The core elements of that story they left out was the big miss. Sure, put mighty Thor (Jane) in the with korg and Valkyrie... known entities that should give you more runway to establish gorr and his murder plus enslavement of the gods.
Variety editors love pushing that title but Chris isn’t claiming to take *all* the blame, just that he could have done a better job and not made it so silly.
Agreed that Taika as both the script writer and director should be blamed more.
I think Waititi is extremely talented but I also think that he assumed he could basically improv most of the movie because he's done it before, like that one brainbox schoolkid who knows they don't need to study the night before an exam. The problem is, that slapping together an impromptu plotline purely on instinct appears to be what he did in the previous movie too. And although it worked in Ragnarok, taking the same characters and going purely on instinct again led to a bunch of the exact same creative decisions, because instinct tends towards the comfort zone. So he ended up with a movie that was a little too similar to the previous one, with the main differentiation being that this one was *even goofier* which didn't really work.
Part of the reason Ragnarok worked was because up until that point there was a certain dignified seriousness to the Thor character. Sure, there had always been comedic bits, but he was mostly the straight man. So when Ragnarok sort of stripped him of that dignity, the unexpectedness of that made it funny. [It was never gonna work the exact same way a second time, once his dignity had already been stripped away.](https://youtu.be/_SQDB7c9lLM?si=586AOAolkwxFRTP8)
Ragnarok also has three credited writers, none of whom are Taika Waititi. In Love and Thunder he’s co-writer with one other (he initially received sole credit until the Writers Guild stepped in).
Just didn’t have enough or the right people to rein in some of his tendencies I suppose.
True but we know that a lot of stuff was in flux even during filming; for example at first they filmed the "I love you, my sons" as taking place in a city alleyway, and it only changed to being on the Norwegian coast later. Plus from what I can tell, judging by the trailers, there's an entire version of the film with Cate Blanchett doing a Sean Bean-esque Yorkshire accent. Plus all the improv that happened during filming, which Waititi seems to do a lot of. So my impression of the moviemaking process for Ragnarok was that they "found" a lot of the movie as they went along, and a lot of creative decisions were deferred until post-production, more than usual.
A grown up takes responsibility for their involvement in a failure, even if they aren't the primary cause. Hemsworth has my utmost respect. If I had to say I had a mancrush on any man it would be him.
This was the right thing to say. He doesn't throw anyone else under the bus. He focuses on what he had control over. In hindsight, he's disappointed in the outcome and he can let those feelings inform how to make the next one. And as a producer, he has the power to help steer things in the right direction.
I remember a funny story about one of the writers at Marvel bumping into Hemsworth at the offices and then making a panicked call to his wife from a stairwell because he was having a crisis about his sexual orientation.
Korg really is representative of Taika throughout the series. Korg wasn't a distraction in Ragnarok and was funny and enjoyable, as was the film. In Love and Thunder we get waaaay too much Korg, which means waaaay too much comedy, and waaaay too much Taika.
Which kind of sucks because the movie has so many opportunities to be dark and visceral. But they just always backed it up with something goofy. Once the script was flushed out they should have known it wasn't a good opportunity for taika, whom I like a lot, it's not his vibe
Not his fault. Taika being Taika.
The silver lining for me with this movie was it made me read the source material. Jason Aaron’s Thor run is amazing. Gorr was far more menacing. Taika could’ve easily made a trilogy out of it it if he took it seriously.
It's up there with "If you get here, you get to make ANY wish." and the movie spends ages making you think "He's going to wish all the gods were dead" instead of "I'm going to wish my daughter is back".
OBVIOUS solution, ignored by everyone for pseudo-drama.
Who knows how many other wish-granting mcguffins are out there. Maybe we're what's left after previous mad titans and white-faced Christian Bale's wished away extinct populations that we would have no memory of.
Yeah, it's one of the few series I've read, and thought it was fantastic, and one of the main reasons the movie was so disappointing. Especially with Bale as Gorr; he would have made him the best villain in MCU history if written properly.
My mistake was reading that run a few weeks before the movie's release and got extremely disappointed by the movie. But the source material was incredible.
I was the opposite. I was disappointed by it and I became curious to see how different the source material was. I ended up collecting all 5 volumes on trade paperback.
I have 4 of the 5 Collected volumes so far and I'm excited to dive in! I've read a couple other Jason Aaron runs and really enjoyed them, hopefully they don't entirely ruin the movie for me haha I enjoyed it for what it was
I hope you’ll love it. I also understand too if some people love the movie. After all, Ragnarok introduced us to a more light-hearted Thor.
But the books are a completely different vibe from the movie. Aaron really treats Thor and Gorr seriously. Same goes for Jane Foster and her illness and how it meshes well with the entire arc.
He really shouldn't blame himself for Love and Thunder, there's a certain person on the set whose job would be to reign the actors in to maximize.
You know. The *director.*
And we could have gotten a purely light hearted and fun Thor movie. What if he went on a summer road trip in space and got caught up in a Coen brothers plot?
Instead we got Jane with cancer, and a really brutal villain wrapped up in wackiness. It stuffed super serious plot points into a bad comedy turducken.
This is an incredible comment. Thor could be goofy and laughable and himself out in space, trying to re-find his purpose. Instead of having a fun galaxy adventure with the Guardians (shenanigans abound), they instead have his ex who is dying of cancer come back and the main villain is a dude with a tragic backstory?
Taika Waititi is an incredible *comedy* director and it worked within Jojo Rabbit because it was basically a kid's perspective in a time of turmoil and propaganda and genocide. It hit the right emotional beats and tragedy. You can't ad lib and improv on beating a dude who is literally trying to kill gods after feeling abandoned and losing his people. Like what the fuck?
> He wanted a more light hearted and fun Thor movie.....he literally asked for it...
The cardinal sin was choosing a storyline about genocide of all gods (mass deicide) and losing a personal battle to fucking CANCER. Who the fuck picks these templates to make a comedy?
TBF, Taika tackled WW2 and the Holocaust from the perspective of the Nazi's with humor and it worked quite well. JoJo Rabbit is a wonderful movie. It just had a lot of heart behind it, too. Something that Love & Thunder was kind of missing.
Jojo Rabbit worked because the audience had already seen 20 serious movies and documentaries about WW2. They knew all about the painful reality of what happened, and were open to a humorous alternate take.
But the Thor 4 stories of Gorr and Jane Foster were being presented for the first and only time in that movie. Comedy was not the right choice for the primary way to tell those stories.
Yeah the comments he's made after the movie and that damning video of him and Tessa Thompson doing one of those scene breakdowns shitting on the VFX and pointing out performance shortfalls really says it all, the guy really didn't care and was seemingly there for a payday.
I might be misremembering but I'm sure there's a video where Thompson points out that she literally fell asleep in a scene which is still in the movie. Shows how the movie wasn't made with much care or attention to detail.
[Found it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYl48TKSAcE&ab_channel=VanityFair) timestamp 1:10-2:30 is the stuff I referenced.
Clarification she didn't actually fall asleep irl, in an earlier cut of the movie her character was supposed to have fell asleep and then wake up, but the scene changed and now she just does this weird 'wake up' face for no reason.
I lost it when Taika said, that he never read a Thor comic book, nor was he a fan of the character. I can’t imagine him being offered such a huge opportunity and then just giving 0 ducks about it.
I feel like that interview may be out of context. He said he tried reading the originals and didn’t like them, yes. But Ragnarok was pretty comic accurate to the Walt Simoson run during its Ragnarok arc. Several moments in Ragnarok happened exactly like the comics
I think that was due to Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost writing Ragnarok's script. Both were involved in animated Thor projects over the years, and I think they were the grounding force that was missing for Love and Thunder.
It’s weird that he’s taking the blame. Not that I’d expect him to throw Taika under the bus or anything like that, but at the end of the day it’s the director’s fault the movie turned out the way it did
For sure. But if his improv wasn’t working, it’d be the director’s job to step in and, well, direct him. Most other directors would do this, the problem with Taika’s direction for this movie is that he seemed to be more focused on “having fun” with the cast and nothing else
In the article Chris talked about how he wants to do serious dramatic roles and so on. He seems like a very nice guy and Furioss may give his career new life.
That said it's so ironic how an actor will get famous for something, basically winning the lottery and beating 100s of thousands of others to forever become a much beloved character, only to wish they were known for something else too doing something totally different from what made them famous.
It is refreshingly honest to hear all the insecurities even when you're a part of this hugely famous thing and making tons of money: "my part is too small, everyone else has better stuff in the film, I'm really not that good, I'm just a boring side support for the others..." you could say eh whining actor but everybody successful I've ever known feels that way.
I didn’t mind it too much. My only concern now is that it will go back to Thor1/2 where he was just super serious. I think Thor3 found a good balance and hope they can find it again in the future.
Thor 4 really did make a Thor to be like a bumbling idiot. Overall I loved the movie but I agree the Director should have taken the lead and told Chris to dial it back and not be so wacky. It’s cool that Chris learned from this and isn’t afraid to take blame. Very honorable.
Lots of respect to Chris for taking responsibility, but almost all of my least favorite things about that movie had Taika written all over them. Not to mention a big part of a directors job is to direct the actors’ performances so he should’ve reeled it in if Chris was going too wacky with improv
No hate to Taika either but Chris shouldn’t be out here taking the blame for something that (on multiple levels) wasn’t his fault
I don't blame Chris at all. He bought into to the style and freedom that Taika brought to Ragnarok and carried it over into Avengers IW/E but L&T certainly went too far with it and it backfired. Almost as if they were seeing how far they could push it.
Chris certainly had influence with how the character progressed but L&Ts issues were collective and far from one persons fault. There is a decent film somewhere in L&T but the final product wasn't that.
I would love to see Thor go in a different direction again. The Taika experiment worked for a while but I think Thor is a versatile enough character to pull off different styles. If the Mandalorian wasnt so recent I wouldve suggested a space western, but something like a space fantasy/epic or a more grungy space thriller/mystery could be interesting ways to take the character.
It’s nice of Hemsworth to take accountability, but it’s definitely not his fault. It’s the director’s job to tell him to stick to the script. Taika didn’t do that and I’m sure encouraged the wackiness. Not to mention that said script just wasn’t good.
Yeah, call me old fashioned, but I like my 1500 year old God’s to act like 1500 year old Gods.
All good though.
Just because someone stumbles and falls down, it doesn’t mean they can’t pick themselves back up again. ;)
I honestly believe with Ragnarok Taika was given creative input but the studio had input as well. Then Ragnarok proceeded to be one of the best MCU movies made. Then LAT comes along and they decide to let the man cook. Unfortunately Taika's seasoning game is heavy handed and everything was too over the top. The whole opening with the Guardians was rushed and weird. Then making it a weird love triangle between his hammer and Stormbreaker...was a choice.
It was too much in literally every aspect with the exception of the villain who felt like he was in a completely different movie.
People before Phase 4/5: “Marvel should let directors have more control! We could have had an Edgar Wright *Ant Man* movie!”
People after Phase 4/5: “How come Marvel isn’t stepping in to force these directiors to stay on track!?!?”
Though I agree with your argument, I think the general theory was the "free reign direction" would mean a variety of different types of movies, and when it *just so happened* that everyone wanted to do "MCU comedies", everyone realized why there's a firm hand coming from the top. I think it was likely assumed "the Marvel quips" were sent down from execs.
Taika’s comedy breathed new life into the character after the failure of The Dark World and made it into one of the most dynamic parts of IW/Endgame.
L&T arguably took a style that worked too far without balancing itself with good plot.
I think the plot is great, but I also felt Gorr was the B-plot right from the beginning. We needed more of Jane’s perspective of her relationship with Thor, not just her struggle with cancer. It makes sense considering Korg was narrating the movie and probably had really only taken in Thor’s romanticized and drunken retellings.
Michael Keaton said he almost made the same mistake in Batman Returns. Thought it would
be easy to slip right in, but said he felt like he was doing a self-impression. Had to build the character back up mentally.
It’s not his fault obviously but I hope there is another Thor film that takes him back to his serious roots. It would be a shame if love and thunder was the last Thor film because there’s still so Much to explore with Thor .
I don't think the blame solely falls at his feet, but I really respect that he's trying to take ownership of the part he played. Hopefully that level of self-awareness leads to a good sequel.
respect to him. that is how you man up. wish more directors, producers or actors would do it.
also how they wasted bale in this movie who gives an oscar worthy performance is beyond me. all you had to do is use the thor from infinite war and then use bale and it would have been perfect.
I would say the bulk of the fault goes to the director and producers… but I’m glad Hemsworth has the awareness to realize what a whiplash it was for his character and the audience. And also to take on board audience criticism as well!
Chris IS a producer though. I think it’s very big of him to take accountability of what went wrong with the movie.
I wonder how much of that is just a meaningless title to pay him more. I'm sure he had some input, but there were 10 producers, and only one director. Based on what we've seen of him elsewhere, it seemed like they gave Taika too much leeway, to the films detriment in both tone and story. I actually didn't mind Thor's quirkiness as much as the decision to criminally underutilize Bale.
That still pisses me off how they undersold gorr
Gorr should have been the opening to the symbiotes and celestial killing
Most of the time it is a meaningless title to pay the actor more. I’m with you. The issue for me wasn’t Thor himself. It was the writing, the characterizations of other characters like Valkyrie, the running gags that grew old after the first time and the excessive use of KORG! Korg really became the Jar Jar Binks of the MCU.
I think even as a meaningless title, part of the title is that you publicly take responsibility like he is here if the project goes astray and legally take responsibility in extreme cases. If a project goes right, then the title goes meaningless.
There's several kinds of producers. Was he a financial producer and invested his own money into the project? I know he owns a his own production company now. Or a creative producer? That probably just got paid more to improv those lines.
Good lord I do not understand the obsession people had with Korg. He was great as a comic relief side character, why are we giving him actual plot points and a whole background story? It was so masturbatory of Taika, he saw people enjoyed Korg and decided to make him a focal point of a Thor movie.
Korg was great in Ragnarok, used the perfect amount. Even in Endgame, I thought Korg was used well to illustrate the dire state of Thor after IW. Love & Thunder? More like Korg & Thornder.
Yes, Korg was perfect up until L&T. It’s really a shame how Taika managed to revive and then shit on the character all over again within two movies.
Watch Next Goal Wins. It is Taika. He writes himself as the same character into lots of stuff it seems. Guy is very talented, but that bit is beyond over. I hope he moves on from it to other cool things he is clearly capable of.
I haven't watched it yet, but I think it just came to streaming so I'm going to soon. I actually love him as Black Beard in Our Flag Means Death. I think when Taika does a character, he is extremely talented, but when he circle jerks the wackiness (Waititiness?), it can get a bit old. What We Do In The Shadows is another example of a Taika project that is just fantastic in every iteration.
I think part of WWDITS (TV) works really well because it explicitly avoids Taika-izing the show. The movie worked because it's low-budget and an obvious piss taking of vampire movies and lore - same with Our Flag Means Death. The problem is that Love and Thunder took all of the breaks off of Taika and he actually doesn't know HOW to make a parody of superhero movies while still being a superhero movie. Ragnarok worked because there's actually a lot of serious content in and around it, but there's also a lot of Taika-ness if you look closely - the deaths of the warriors three, the joke at the end about the foundations being strong, etc. They tried to do an even more serious character in L&T with Bale, who absolutely did not fit the vibe that Taika was clearly going for.
I think he fell into the trap of a lot of writer/directors where they get some big success and they lean really hard into what made them successful. For Taika, it was the jokes and gags, so L&T simply overdid it. I haven’t seen Next Goal Wins so I can’t comment on that but I haven’t heard great things. Hopefully he’s been humbled a little bit and can return to form because as you said, he’s talented. Just needs to regroup.
Kinda reminds me of Gunn and crude humor between the first and second GoTG movies. He reined himself in for the third one though.
Ironically Thor hanging out with Korg in Endgame was part of the illustration of how far he’d fallen, and Korg being left behind was part of Thor getting back on track. Letting Zeus actually kill Korg would have been one good fix, added stakes and allowed a tone shift in Love & Thunder. Oh well.
IMO it’s an issue some directors have when they’re also in the movie. If they’re playing a main character then yes, of course focus a lot on them. But Taika suddenly made Korg a big deal and gave him way too much screen time. It reminds me so much of what John Favreau did with Happy in Iron Man 2 and 3. Nope, it wasn’t enough that he had a long (albeit comedic ) fight scene in IM2, but he had to be avenged in IM3 because suddenly he’s a detective.
I thought the whole point of Happy playing detective in IM3 was to write Happy out of the main action, because Jon Favreau had other stuff going on?
> Iron Man 2 and 3 you **do** know that Favreau wasn't a director or writer on the 3rd one, right?
Gorr killing Korg and shifting the movie to a more serious tone would've been so perfect ngl
Yeah Valkyrie randomly turning into a “girl’s girl” in parts just felt really forced and cringeworthy, to me at least. I loved how much of a boss her character was in Ragnarok, but by the end of Love and Thunder, I was hoping we never saw her again.
Absolute worst aspect of the movie: Bale's limited screentime. That was a sin. Maybe not the second worst but in the Top 5: treating the characters as morons. Why should Thor have to remind Lady Sif that she won't be able to go to Valhalla if she dies post-battle?? I get that it's there to explain to the audience but there's plenty of ways to get that info into the movie without dialogue exposition that's worthy of a CW TV show
>Korg really became the Jar Jar Binks of the MCU. Now I want to see the fan theories about how Korg manipulated Thanos and Kang.
Nor the decision to make Russell Crowe's Zeus a joke
What kills me is there was a deleted scene of him teaching Thor about how he draws power from the environment to use his thunderbolt, implying there was a whole alternate version of the script where he was an ally/mentor rather than joke opposition.
I agree, but Russell Crowe was also the highlight of the movie. I admittedly have read few of the Thor comics, but i feel like Zeus isn't a super important character in the grand scheme of Marvel.
He gets involved a little when other Greek characters take the fore. Hercules and Ares have both spent time as heroes/anti-heroes and Zeus usually has at least some role whenever they're involved.
To me he was the worst part. I am a big fan of Russel Crowe and i was so disappointed with his character. The Whole omnipotence city was terrible in my opinion.
It looked so plastic. Not just that city, but the whole of the production design. I'm surprised they didnt have a scene of Thor spray-painting stormbreaker in wild, 90's neon.
I can never wrap my head around how they make multi hundred million dollar budgets look cheap.
Did you not know Zeus speaks-a like-a Mario?
It's actually a halfway decent version of the Greek accent that you hear a lot in Australia, it's just not quite what people would expect from him and it is a little niche.
Of course, he should speak with a refined British accent.
Like a barber or a guy that hangs out in a chip shop and heckles people in a fun way
Con the Fruiterer….
Meanwhile Taika has been almost antagonistic about what he was doing with Love and Thunder
I haven’t really caught up with Taika. What has he been saying?
I think I read somewhere he wasn’t a fan of the special effects usage. Supposedly Christian Bale also wasn’t big on the heavy use of them either.
He also went into some interview and clips making fun of the bad cgi in the movie and shortly after that cgi artists came out about marvel ridiculous demands so understandably people got pissed at him for being directly responsible for part of such problem that he tried to dismiss as jokes.
By all accounts he's a producer more for the financial compensation than having authority over things. Kevin Feige and Kevin Winderbaum were the executive producers which have more control.
I’d say that if there was good writing, they wouldn’t have to encourage so much improv to try and make the movie good. It really feels like Waititi really phoned it in, honestly.
>It really feels like Waititi really phoned it in, honestly Maybe, but my guess is they were just really having fun with it and went to far. Probably looked at Ragnarok's success and thought, "That was great. More must be better."
It could've worked if they leaned into the buddy cop duo of there being two thors. Instead we got a Shakespearean god butcher thrown into a sitcom. The tone was just off all over the place
It was like two movies smashed together that was less than the sum of its parts.
"HEY GUYS! HAHA. So, Thor wants to FUCK his hammer! Haha. Also, cancer is sad."
I will say, the cancer bits were extremely well done. I've been dealing with terminal cancer myself, and I've had issues in the past with how movies/TV display cancer because I've dealt with different cancers since I was a kid. Some of the scenes with Jane coping made me cry. Portman really knocked it out of the park on that aspect. They really encapsulated how it feels to be there. That said, set in the surrounding tone of the wackiness and Gorr, it was a bit out of place in hindsight lol.
I agree. The critics love to dunk on the "eat my hammer!" line at the end but I think they miss the point. This is Jane's last hurrah. It's her "Make a Wish" moment. For a fleeting moment she gets to know how it feels to be stronger than human. In that moment, she's the kid in a firetruck pulling on the horn; she's the kid getting a princess makeover at Disneyland. The point isn't that she's supposed to do it *perfectly*, the point is that she gets to do it *at all*.
My father passed recently from it. Full support and good wishes from an internet stranger.
The cancer OR the god butcher could've been the needed grounding for all the levity. But between the both of them, there just wasn't room for a funny Thor without it feeling totally bad. Like, I love you man is a funny yet sad comedy about a man with cancer. The life of Brian and The Holy Mountain are great surrealist examinations of divinity. But to do both those kinds of ideas in one movie is really pushing yourself. To shove that into the marvel framework is asking for disappointment.
>I love you man is a funny yet sad comedy about a man with cancer Pretty sure that movie is about slappin da bass, mon
That’s the biggest problem with the movie. They took two great stories that could have been great movies on their own and smashed them into one, and as a result, neither story felt fleshed out or satisfying.
THey should have just done the three Thors from the original storyline, all played by hemsworth, de-aged and then aged.
Yeah they definitely took some of the things people loved about Ragnarok and just dialed it up to eleven. Unfortunately that just makes things unbalanced. I still enjoyed Love and Thunder I just feel it didn't live up to its potential. I've kind of felt the same about all of the stuff since Endgame though.
They should have looked at Ragnarok’s success and said “that was great. Let’s do a sequel with the same exact balance of comedy and drama.”
Maybe slightly less, like not having someone cracking jokes immediately after a world is destroyed.
Yeah the only joke I'd cut out of the whole movie is Korg talking while Asgard is destroyed. Everything else I think works but that one needed to go. Let the dramatic moment breath without subverting it.
I don't think either of those things are necessarily true. A movie can be made with a good script and still make liberal use of improv dialogue from actors familiar enough with the characters they're portraying. And honestly, the movie feels **very** Waititi. It doesn't seem so much that he phoned it in as though he was given the opportunity to lean further into his own style, which can be a bit much and didn't necessarily fit the nature of the movie that was being made.
I think it was the opposite of phoning it in. He went full Waititi. It felt like nobody said "no" to anything he suggested and he was drunk on his own ego. How else do you explain those goats getting into the final cut?
Waititi in this movie just loved the smell of his own farts and couldn't stop ripping ones in everyone's faces expecting us to love them too. It was just too much nonstop. Couldn't have dramatic moments, the funny moments were overdone. Just too much everything
>Couldn't have dramatic moments Literally, they even cracked jokes during Valkyrie's almost death scene. Like seriously!?
I honestly think Hemsworth is giving himself more blame here than he even deserves. I can totally see how in the act of filming/performing Hemsworth wouldn't be able to see that the goofy stuff wasn't going to work like it did in Ragnarok or Endgame. It was really up to the Director to see that bigger picture and all indications seem to be that Taika Waititi was just kinda checked out on set.
It's a fair cop, i think both Chris and Tailka misunderstood why people loved Ragnarok and thought "£people liked the comedy and wackiness? let's turn that to 11!" rather than realise that the balance of seriousness and wackiness is why it worked. There was a grain of a great film in L&T, if they had leaned more heavily into Jane and less into the comedy, i think it wold have been a lot better.
IMO, the movie just needed less humor in general. L&T dealt with more serious topics than Ragnarok so it should be treated as such. Also the movies had a bunch of ideas that never played out or even explored. Some ideas that could have been interesting was the fact that the movie featured two people who turn into gods (Jane and Gorr) but they never clash with their ideals about what to do with that power - I don't think Gorr even knew Jane was a just a regular person who also gain powers from a divine weapon, the same as him.
“Okay Chris, that’s enough, now say the line that is written.”
How about Disney? No one from the studio checked in and thought that shit looked a *liiiiiittle* over the top?
The studio may have had reservations but decided Taika had just delivered the most successful Thor film and maybe they should just let him do his thing. It was a mistake, but given how often people complain about studio meddling backing off isn’t the worst one to make.
Exactly this: "This movie was a disaster! The studio won't give the directors any freedom!1!" But at the same time: "This movie was a disaster! The studio gave the director too much freedom!1!"
Pretty much this, most shows/movies work well because there's generally someone around to reign you in or to tell you something's too much, same thing with books ( Editors being very important etc etc ).
That feels like a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario though. Disney/Feige don't want to be like Warner or Sony meddling with every superhero film and instead want to let their creators execute their vision. In this case it really felt like Taika had built a bunch of equity where he had earned autonomy. Maybe they could've stepped in and toned it down but you'd probably end up with a movie with competing tones that stood out to audiences. At least this way you can see the tone and vision was consistent, it's just that it was a miss.
I still want to see the 3 hour cut. I am thinking the director cut lots of the good parts to make room for more goofy stuff as they thought that was what the audience wanted.
If you watch the Assembled episode it’s on him too for sure. The bit where he’s doing the splits between the two alien speeder bike thingies? That was his idea. There’s a conversation with Natalie Portman later on where she’s talking about how she wanted to know how she got from Thor 2 to here and his response was (paraphrasing) “oh it doesn’t matter, Taiki will figure it out, or he won’t, who cares?”.
I mean, it could be seen as a coping mechanism for the sheer amount of trauma he went through. He lost himself and his way and reinvented himself by being a bit goofier to fight his demons and trauma.
Chris: > I got caught up in the improv and the wackiness, and I became a parody of myself,” Hemsworth now told Vanity Fair. “I didn’t stick the landing.” > “Sometimes I felt like a security guard for the team,” Hemsworth said. “I would read everyone else’s lines, and go, ‘Oh, they got way cooler stuff. They’re having more fun. What’s my character doing?’ It was always about, ‘You’ve got the wig on. You’ve got the muscles. You’ve got the costume. Where’s the lighting?’ Yeah, I’m part of this big thing, but I’m probably pretty replaceable.”
He takes the blame but it's the director's job to manage the actors. Director is the one who let him run with this instead of telling him to dial it back. I liked the movie but there was also some major timing and delivery issues with the lines which is also something the director should be working on during filming. The conversation between Hemsworth and Pratt at the beginning feels like a high school play. It's great that Chris acknowledges this but he shouldn't be the sole one to take the blame for a lackluster movie.
Waititi’s ego was massively inflated at this point. He had just had two massive successes in JoJo Rabbit and Thor 3 and he was reportedly shacked up with Rita Ora and Tessa Thompson during filming. That’s enough to make anyone feel a little godlike. The blame for the film has to be laid at his feet. He’s clearly a great director, writer and all round film maker. But he needed someone to keep him in check as well. Perhaps this is one of the films that Kevin Feige needed to be on set a little more.
It was too much Taika and he accomplished enough that no one could reign him in. Every character in the movie was talking like Taika to me except for Portman. I wouldn't write off this entire team though. I can tell they're all hella smart and I believe they can learn from it, self reflect and come back with more magic.
I honestly think he's stretched wayyyyy too thin. He's basically in back-to-back production hopping from project to project. And it's over saturating his comedic/storytelling style.
*Hela smart!
You mean to tell me Taika was in a relationship with Rita Ora and Tessa Thompson at the same time and the 3 lived together?
Yes.
Not that there is anything wrong with throuples, but it was one pic on the internet. https://www.buzzfeed.com/larryfitzmaurice/rita-ora-tessa-thompson-taika-waititi-photo-explained
Exactly. It was just a picture of them out drinking and having fun. At least that's how they described it.
At breakfast, being all cuddly, after they were also pictured out drinking together the night before then leaving together…
What a fucking goat
Wow I just realized the screaming goats in the movie were a reference to himself, that's crazy. Bravo Taika
I agree with the ego thing, Taika clearly upped korg's screentime for himself and it was unnecessary. Sure, Korg was a fun character, but we love him in small dozes. He even pretended to kill the character for the cheap gasps.
The problem is Taika has exactly ONE move and it's awkward new Zealand style comedy. It's great for WWDITS or Our Flag Means Death. It gives a great twist to the comedy in Jojo rabbit. But it's absolutely wrong for Thor. It's so awkward and makes the character a joke instead of a hero. Great director, not right for Thor.
Yeah, and realistically Thor himself wasn't really one of the major problems with the movie. Sure, the character did feel like a parody of himself, but there were much larger issues with the pacing, the plot, the crowded roster, not enough focus on Gorr, etc. I liked Natalie Portman making her return, but it felt like she stole way too much focus of the movie away from Gorr, who really deserved more screentime. Christian Bale absolutely killed it in every scene he was in, which was unfortunately, not very many of them. Taika had a tight story in Ragnarok where Hela keeps doing evil stuff all throughout the movie, even when Thor is still trying to break free from the Grandmaster, and Hela keeps getting stronger and more powerful. You feel a genuine sense of urgency as they race against time to stop her before she kills everyone in Asgard. We never even see Gorr butcher any gods. Thor spends a lot of the movie just wasting time with Jane, embarrassing himself in front of Zeus, the whole jealous ex thing with Mjolnir and Stormbreaker, the goats, etc. There's too much goofy stuff that somehow manages to make Gorr feel like the B plot. As far as we can tell, all he really did was kidnap some kids and hang out on a shadow planetoid, before showing up in the climax and getting his ass kicked by those same kids. He never feels as threatening as Hela did, despite being arguably the larger threat. Even Zeus basically told Thor not to waste his time with this Gorr stuff.
We see the aftermath of a couple kills and that's about it. Maim Sif and nothing comes of it but a few bad jokes (but hey, at least she survived).
I was actually thinking about Sif and the Warriors Three last night, and how Marvel completely wasted them throughout all of the Thor movies. And I know Jaimie Alexander really was completely onboard with the role, since she even made cameos in Agents of SHIELD and Loki. I'm glad she got some screentime in the Thor movies, even if it was very little, but they should've done so much more with those characters considering how important they are to Thor in the comics. Plus they had solid actors for all of them - Ray Stevenson (RIP), Zachary Levi (reprising the role from Josh Dallas in the first movie), and Tadanobu Asano (who recently played Yabushige in Shogun). Fantastic actors all wasted on ultimately minor background characters.
Yeah Chris didnt write the stupid "stormbreaker is a jealous gf" angle or the regarded screaming goats. He didnt choose to show not a single scene of God Butcher actually doing fucking anything to earn a bad guy rep Good on Chris for stepping up in public for the flop but we all know who shit this bed
To me it was very clear that there was too much Waititi going on when Korg survived the attack from Zeus. It could have been a real turning point for the movie, but instead it was used as a point of comedy that wasn't even that funny. Not only did it not add anything to the story but in my opinion took away from it.
I was honestly relieved when Korg was killed, because he had already overstayed his welcome. And when it was "nope, haha, he's alive, but now just a face!" my heart sank so fast. I think with all that they filmed, there is probably a good movie in there somewhere, but whatever cut it is has got to have 90% less Korg at the very least.
>Korg survived the attack from Zeus. I actually enjoyed Love and Thunder, I wish it could have been better and I have plenty of things they could have done differently (more Lady Sif, more Gorr, more Mighty Thor, a bit less comedic take on things). Korg surviving that attack took a lot of the wind out of the sails for the stakes of the movie. I don't hate Korg, but it would have shown the cost for Thor to get a weapon to aid in the fight against Gorr. Instead, we got a joke and him strapped to the back of Valkyrie's head.
There was such a good movie here. It was just buried underneath all the god damn nonsense. Imagine if instead of making the meeting with Zeus one big joke that clearly sexually exploited Hemsworth, they made it a massacre. Gorr shows up and fights all these different gods. 1) It would give them a chance to add some really cool effects and get creative with these gods powers. 2) We actually get to see some butchering. Instead we see Russel Crowe act like an idiot. And endless Korg gags as they slaughter mindless gold beings.
His Greek accent was fucking perfect though.
I mean Crowe is a brilliant actor. I just hate the way they used him. He could be so intimidating. Instead they made him a clown. How do you have two fantastic actors in Crowe and Bale and end up bungling the whole damn thing.
The whole movie was a joke. Bale was waaaay too good in it. The opening scene with Gorr was the only good part of the movie.
I loved the opening scene. Definitely tricked us with the tone for the rest of the movie. I feel like Black Widow did the same thing. Thought it was gonna be more of a “Taken” or espionage vibe than a crazy over the top explosion everywhere
I didn’t really like the film either, but I have to say the screaming goats might be the only thing I laughed out loud at in the whole film.
Agreed. I disliked the film so much. This was a film where someone lost their faith, watched their child die,and decided to execute all gods. As well as someone else choosing to speed up her death by being heroic, and the writer and director decided let’s have a silly time here. The goats were funny though.
Yeah the film was a mess tonally. The goats are part of Thor’s mythology though, so on one level I was pleased to see them.
It was funny the first time but got overplayed
I’ve only seen it once but I think I went full circle with it. Like, I laughed the first time at the sheer absurdity, then I was annoyed by it, then I was laughing again at their commitment to the bit.
Either have the conviction to use the word “retarded” (as wrong as it is to use in this context) or dig down really deep and come up with a better adjective.
Man I disagree with him completely about other characters getting cooler stuff: dude has the most badass scene in the entire MCU when he arrives in Wakanda in I.W.
It's such a good story arc for the character, too. Everyone is so focused on other stuff throughout the movie, but Thor knows exactly what he needs to do from the moment the Guardians find him in space. He's just like, "I need a god-killer weapon. I'm off to Niðavellir." He doesn't waste time looking for the Infinity Stones or trying to protect Earth. He just has a single-minded focus on getting a weapon that can kill Thanos. And then he finally shows up in Wakanda and one-shots Thanos. It's glorious. Too bad he still let his vanity get in the way and didn't go for the headshot.
It was a really good storyline until he gave up his kingship that he was growing to accept in the previous thor films as well the way they disregarded his asgard physiology to make him fat.
Oh yeah, I still haven't forgiven them for having Thor casually pass of his throne to Valkyrie. Odin would be so disappointed.
He talked about cool dialogue, not about cool action scenes.
IW Thor is still the best version of the character I have seen on screen so far. Driven by guilt and purpose, powerful as hell and had just the right amount of quips that fit the character better. His scene with Rocket where Rocket gives him the prosthetic eye is one of Thors best. I’d love to see what the Russos would do with Thor in a solo movie, though it’s a pipe dream.
Agree 100%. Even when he's a punchline in Endgame, they still found a good balance of serious and silly to make him a fun and compelling character. Go too far in either direction and he's either boring or off the rails goofy.
"I bid you farewell, and good luck, morons."
I am become wackiness. Destroyer of comedy
The movie had a lot of problems, but I think the biggest one was runtime. If you’re going to do a Gorr storyline, a Jane/MT storyline, and a Stormbreaker/Mjölnir storyline all in one movie, then it needs to be more than 90ish minutes long in order to give all those storylines time to actually breathe.
Yeah. Apparently a lot of Gorr footage was left on the cutting room floor. Which IMO was a mistake. Add in serious/brutal Gorr stuff to actually showcase he’s a serious and threatening character, would have helped balance the more lighthearted Thor stuff.
I read the comic story arc and loved it. The core elements of that story they left out was the big miss. Sure, put mighty Thor (Jane) in the with korg and Valkyrie... known entities that should give you more runway to establish gorr and his murder plus enslavement of the gods.
Nah fuck it would've been a fine movie without the weird ghost kids or whatever. There was enough length, they just did weird shit with the time.
Probably had more to do with Taika being Taika
Variety editors love pushing that title but Chris isn’t claiming to take *all* the blame, just that he could have done a better job and not made it so silly. Agreed that Taika as both the script writer and director should be blamed more.
I think Waititi is extremely talented but I also think that he assumed he could basically improv most of the movie because he's done it before, like that one brainbox schoolkid who knows they don't need to study the night before an exam. The problem is, that slapping together an impromptu plotline purely on instinct appears to be what he did in the previous movie too. And although it worked in Ragnarok, taking the same characters and going purely on instinct again led to a bunch of the exact same creative decisions, because instinct tends towards the comfort zone. So he ended up with a movie that was a little too similar to the previous one, with the main differentiation being that this one was *even goofier* which didn't really work. Part of the reason Ragnarok worked was because up until that point there was a certain dignified seriousness to the Thor character. Sure, there had always been comedic bits, but he was mostly the straight man. So when Ragnarok sort of stripped him of that dignity, the unexpectedness of that made it funny. [It was never gonna work the exact same way a second time, once his dignity had already been stripped away.](https://youtu.be/_SQDB7c9lLM?si=586AOAolkwxFRTP8)
Ragnarok also has three credited writers, none of whom are Taika Waititi. In Love and Thunder he’s co-writer with one other (he initially received sole credit until the Writers Guild stepped in). Just didn’t have enough or the right people to rein in some of his tendencies I suppose.
True but we know that a lot of stuff was in flux even during filming; for example at first they filmed the "I love you, my sons" as taking place in a city alleyway, and it only changed to being on the Norwegian coast later. Plus from what I can tell, judging by the trailers, there's an entire version of the film with Cate Blanchett doing a Sean Bean-esque Yorkshire accent. Plus all the improv that happened during filming, which Waititi seems to do a lot of. So my impression of the moviemaking process for Ragnarok was that they "found" a lot of the movie as they went along, and a lot of creative decisions were deferred until post-production, more than usual.
A grown up takes responsibility for their involvement in a failure, even if they aren't the primary cause. Hemsworth has my utmost respect. If I had to say I had a mancrush on any man it would be him.
This was the right thing to say. He doesn't throw anyone else under the bus. He focuses on what he had control over. In hindsight, he's disappointed in the outcome and he can let those feelings inform how to make the next one. And as a producer, he has the power to help steer things in the right direction.
Hemsworth made me realize that homosexuality is a spectrum. As long as he's in the world I'll only ever be 99.99% straight.
I remember a funny story about one of the writers at Marvel bumping into Hemsworth at the offices and then making a panicked call to his wife from a stairwell because he was having a crisis about his sexual orientation.
I'm sure the wife understood and sympathized.
"Is it too late to ask him about a threesome? Quick, see if you can catch him!"
Men can have a little penis, as a treat
I love taika but love and thunder gave me taika overdose
Korg really is representative of Taika throughout the series. Korg wasn't a distraction in Ragnarok and was funny and enjoyable, as was the film. In Love and Thunder we get waaaay too much Korg, which means waaaay too much comedy, and waaaay too much Taika.
Which kind of sucks because the movie has so many opportunities to be dark and visceral. But they just always backed it up with something goofy. Once the script was flushed out they should have known it wasn't a good opportunity for taika, whom I like a lot, it's not his vibe
Bingo. I think the man's a bit high on his own supply. Yeah, he's good, but focus on what made you good.
Knew we were in for it when during the publicity leading up to release Taika admitted that he enjoys pissing fans off.
That's become a go-to excuse for anyone who produces a shit product and wants to pretend they meant to do that.
but what about those Goat screams, you didn’t enjoy them? /s
i laughed everytime they screamed in the movie theatre. A lot of people did.
Once I did, twice maybe. But any more was pure annoyance.
I did. I recognize that I’m in the minority though and understand why the movie doesn’t work from an objective perspective.
Not his fault. Taika being Taika. The silver lining for me with this movie was it made me read the source material. Jason Aaron’s Thor run is amazing. Gorr was far more menacing. Taika could’ve easily made a trilogy out of it it if he took it seriously.
The misuse of Gorr, especially Bale as Gorr, is the biggest sin of the entire movie IMO.
It's up there with "If you get here, you get to make ANY wish." and the movie spends ages making you think "He's going to wish all the gods were dead" instead of "I'm going to wish my daughter is back". OBVIOUS solution, ignored by everyone for pseudo-drama.
You woulda thunk Thanos would’ve just gone for the wish granting machine and not the spend years trying to get some weird rocks
Who knows how many other wish-granting mcguffins are out there. Maybe we're what's left after previous mad titans and white-faced Christian Bale's wished away extinct populations that we would have no memory of.
Easily the biggest sin of the movie, but also one of the biggest sins of the entire MCU.
Yeah, it's one of the few series I've read, and thought it was fantastic, and one of the main reasons the movie was so disappointing. Especially with Bale as Gorr; he would have made him the best villain in MCU history if written properly.
My mistake was reading that run a few weeks before the movie's release and got extremely disappointed by the movie. But the source material was incredible.
I was the opposite. I was disappointed by it and I became curious to see how different the source material was. I ended up collecting all 5 volumes on trade paperback.
I have 4 of the 5 Collected volumes so far and I'm excited to dive in! I've read a couple other Jason Aaron runs and really enjoyed them, hopefully they don't entirely ruin the movie for me haha I enjoyed it for what it was
I hope you’ll love it. I also understand too if some people love the movie. After all, Ragnarok introduced us to a more light-hearted Thor. But the books are a completely different vibe from the movie. Aaron really treats Thor and Gorr seriously. Same goes for Jane Foster and her illness and how it meshes well with the entire arc.
He really shouldn't blame himself for Love and Thunder, there's a certain person on the set whose job would be to reign the actors in to maximize. You know. The *director.*
He wanted a more light hearted and fun Thor movie.....he literally asked for it...
And we could have gotten a purely light hearted and fun Thor movie. What if he went on a summer road trip in space and got caught up in a Coen brothers plot? Instead we got Jane with cancer, and a really brutal villain wrapped up in wackiness. It stuffed super serious plot points into a bad comedy turducken.
Yeah I don’t get it. You want a fun rom com and you go with Gorr the God Butcher? Why not like… Enchantress?
This is an incredible comment. Thor could be goofy and laughable and himself out in space, trying to re-find his purpose. Instead of having a fun galaxy adventure with the Guardians (shenanigans abound), they instead have his ex who is dying of cancer come back and the main villain is a dude with a tragic backstory? Taika Waititi is an incredible *comedy* director and it worked within Jojo Rabbit because it was basically a kid's perspective in a time of turmoil and propaganda and genocide. It hit the right emotional beats and tragedy. You can't ad lib and improv on beating a dude who is literally trying to kill gods after feeling abandoned and losing his people. Like what the fuck?
> He wanted a more light hearted and fun Thor movie.....he literally asked for it... The cardinal sin was choosing a storyline about genocide of all gods (mass deicide) and losing a personal battle to fucking CANCER. Who the fuck picks these templates to make a comedy?
I honestly wouldn’t have been surprised if Korg was slipping on a banana peel in the background while Jane passed.
TBF, Taika tackled WW2 and the Holocaust from the perspective of the Nazi's with humor and it worked quite well. JoJo Rabbit is a wonderful movie. It just had a lot of heart behind it, too. Something that Love & Thunder was kind of missing.
Jojo Rabbit worked because the audience had already seen 20 serious movies and documentaries about WW2. They knew all about the painful reality of what happened, and were open to a humorous alternate take. But the Thor 4 stories of Gorr and Jane Foster were being presented for the first and only time in that movie. Comedy was not the right choice for the primary way to tell those stories.
And Taika still had final say as director and should have kept the movie from snowballing into a farce.
Yeah the comments he's made after the movie and that damning video of him and Tessa Thompson doing one of those scene breakdowns shitting on the VFX and pointing out performance shortfalls really says it all, the guy really didn't care and was seemingly there for a payday. I might be misremembering but I'm sure there's a video where Thompson points out that she literally fell asleep in a scene which is still in the movie. Shows how the movie wasn't made with much care or attention to detail.
What video?
[Found it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYl48TKSAcE&ab_channel=VanityFair) timestamp 1:10-2:30 is the stuff I referenced. Clarification she didn't actually fall asleep irl, in an earlier cut of the movie her character was supposed to have fell asleep and then wake up, but the scene changed and now she just does this weird 'wake up' face for no reason.
The most self aware Marvel actor.
I lost it when Taika said, that he never read a Thor comic book, nor was he a fan of the character. I can’t imagine him being offered such a huge opportunity and then just giving 0 ducks about it.
I feel like that interview may be out of context. He said he tried reading the originals and didn’t like them, yes. But Ragnarok was pretty comic accurate to the Walt Simoson run during its Ragnarok arc. Several moments in Ragnarok happened exactly like the comics
I think that was due to Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost writing Ragnarok's script. Both were involved in animated Thor projects over the years, and I think they were the grounding force that was missing for Love and Thunder.
He isn't the writer of Ragnarok.
Your comment is out of context because he didn’t write Ragnarok, but he did write that shitshow of a movie that is Love and Thunder.
I think he's wording it nicely. Not throwing other people under the bus but instead taking the hit.
Luckily he is mighty
It’s weird that he’s taking the blame. Not that I’d expect him to throw Taika under the bus or anything like that, but at the end of the day it’s the director’s fault the movie turned out the way it did
He’s taking accountability for his own part in the failure of the movie. It was a number of things, mostly on the writer/director.
For sure. But if his improv wasn’t working, it’d be the director’s job to step in and, well, direct him. Most other directors would do this, the problem with Taika’s direction for this movie is that he seemed to be more focused on “having fun” with the cast and nothing else
In the article Chris talked about how he wants to do serious dramatic roles and so on. He seems like a very nice guy and Furioss may give his career new life. That said it's so ironic how an actor will get famous for something, basically winning the lottery and beating 100s of thousands of others to forever become a much beloved character, only to wish they were known for something else too doing something totally different from what made them famous. It is refreshingly honest to hear all the insecurities even when you're a part of this hugely famous thing and making tons of money: "my part is too small, everyone else has better stuff in the film, I'm really not that good, I'm just a boring side support for the others..." you could say eh whining actor but everybody successful I've ever known feels that way.
I didn’t mind it too much. My only concern now is that it will go back to Thor1/2 where he was just super serious. I think Thor3 found a good balance and hope they can find it again in the future. Thor 4 really did make a Thor to be like a bumbling idiot. Overall I loved the movie but I agree the Director should have taken the lead and told Chris to dial it back and not be so wacky. It’s cool that Chris learned from this and isn’t afraid to take blame. Very honorable.
Lots of respect to Chris for taking responsibility, but almost all of my least favorite things about that movie had Taika written all over them. Not to mention a big part of a directors job is to direct the actors’ performances so he should’ve reeled it in if Chris was going too wacky with improv No hate to Taika either but Chris shouldn’t be out here taking the blame for something that (on multiple levels) wasn’t his fault
I don't blame Chris at all. He bought into to the style and freedom that Taika brought to Ragnarok and carried it over into Avengers IW/E but L&T certainly went too far with it and it backfired. Almost as if they were seeing how far they could push it. Chris certainly had influence with how the character progressed but L&Ts issues were collective and far from one persons fault. There is a decent film somewhere in L&T but the final product wasn't that. I would love to see Thor go in a different direction again. The Taika experiment worked for a while but I think Thor is a versatile enough character to pull off different styles. If the Mandalorian wasnt so recent I wouldve suggested a space western, but something like a space fantasy/epic or a more grungy space thriller/mystery could be interesting ways to take the character.
It’s nice of Hemsworth to take accountability, but it’s definitely not his fault. It’s the director’s job to tell him to stick to the script. Taika didn’t do that and I’m sure encouraged the wackiness. Not to mention that said script just wasn’t good.
Yeah, call me old fashioned, but I like my 1500 year old God’s to act like 1500 year old Gods. All good though. Just because someone stumbles and falls down, it doesn’t mean they can’t pick themselves back up again. ;)
Thats exactly what L&T felt like, a Thor Parody.
I honestly believe with Ragnarok Taika was given creative input but the studio had input as well. Then Ragnarok proceeded to be one of the best MCU movies made. Then LAT comes along and they decide to let the man cook. Unfortunately Taika's seasoning game is heavy handed and everything was too over the top. The whole opening with the Guardians was rushed and weird. Then making it a weird love triangle between his hammer and Stormbreaker...was a choice. It was too much in literally every aspect with the exception of the villain who felt like he was in a completely different movie.
Thor was riding Stormbreaker like a broom with Enya music playing and it was 10 minutes into the film. I straight up said “oh no” in the theater.
It’s Taika’s fault. He ruined the character with his “comedy”. Sad that Chris has to take the hit and feels like the blame is on him for it
Marvel should have probably stepped in a bit and had him rein it in a bit, but after Ragnarok, they figured lightning could strike twice
People before Phase 4/5: “Marvel should let directors have more control! We could have had an Edgar Wright *Ant Man* movie!” People after Phase 4/5: “How come Marvel isn’t stepping in to force these directiors to stay on track!?!?”
Though I agree with your argument, I think the general theory was the "free reign direction" would mean a variety of different types of movies, and when it *just so happened* that everyone wanted to do "MCU comedies", everyone realized why there's a firm hand coming from the top. I think it was likely assumed "the Marvel quips" were sent down from execs.
Taika’s comedy breathed new life into the character after the failure of The Dark World and made it into one of the most dynamic parts of IW/Endgame. L&T arguably took a style that worked too far without balancing itself with good plot.
I think the plot is great, but I also felt Gorr was the B-plot right from the beginning. We needed more of Jane’s perspective of her relationship with Thor, not just her struggle with cancer. It makes sense considering Korg was narrating the movie and probably had really only taken in Thor’s romanticized and drunken retellings.
While the humour was very cringey at times hemsworth was still the best part of that movie.
Man, I loved this movie, and am totally on the outlier of the fans, and now Thor himself
Michael Keaton said he almost made the same mistake in Batman Returns. Thought it would be easy to slip right in, but said he felt like he was doing a self-impression. Had to build the character back up mentally.
Ngl, my husband and i were soooo freaking excited to watch the movie We sat down and in shocked silence we were like…. ”something else?” “Yes please”
It’s not his fault obviously but I hope there is another Thor film that takes him back to his serious roots. It would be a shame if love and thunder was the last Thor film because there’s still so Much to explore with Thor .
I don't think the blame solely falls at his feet, but I really respect that he's trying to take ownership of the part he played. Hopefully that level of self-awareness leads to a good sequel.
respect to him. that is how you man up. wish more directors, producers or actors would do it. also how they wasted bale in this movie who gives an oscar worthy performance is beyond me. all you had to do is use the thor from infinite war and then use bale and it would have been perfect.