My Thoughts on Taika Waititi’s comments on Ragnarok and Love and Thunder

My Thoughts on Taika Waititi’s comments on Ragnarok and Love and Thunder 

A couple days back, Deadline reported comments regarding Taika Waititi’s reasons for directing both Thor Ragnarok and Love and Thunder. Well, I have some thoughts on those that I wanted to talk about. So let’s get started! 

The Article:

https://deadline.com/2023/11/taika-waititi-no-interest-directing-thor-ragnarok-1235639217/

What does it say?: So Taika Waititi had a new movie come out just a few weeks back titled Next Goal Wins that stars Michael Fassbender. He appeared on a podcast hosted by Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, and Sean Hayes and discussed the reasons why he chose to direct Thor Ragnarok. This is a quote from the article. “I had no interest in doing one of those films. It wasn’t on my plan for my career as an auteur. But I was poor and I’d just had a second child, and I thought ‘you know what, this would be a great opportunity to feed these children’”. Then goes on to say that as a kid he found Thor boring, upon getting the job read a Thor comic book and was baffled by the idea of the character. That’s essentially what Taika said in the articles when he asked about directing Ragnarok and Love and Thunder. 

My Thoughts: 

• If you’ve seen my MCU rankings, you know I’m a very big fan of Ragnarok. I have that either in my top 10 MCU or just outside, I love that movie. And going into 2022, Love and Thunder was one of my most anticipated films. I was so excited, I loved that Taika was coming back. And all of the trailers worked for me and like most people…I left pretty disappointed. I think that’s the most disappointing MCU movie for me. And the more I’ve thought about it, the less and less I’ve liked it. I haven’t seen all of his movies, I still have yet to see Next Goal Wins. I haven’t seen any of his pre-MCU movies, I did see JoJo Rabbit. I was not a fan of that movie, that was my least favorite of the Best Picture nominees that year. And when he makes these comments, it makes me like JoJo Rabbit and Love and Thunder even less, and it makes me not want to see Next Goal Wins. As of now, he’s still signed on to direct a Star Wars movie, I’m not excited for that anymore. Mainly because I haven’t liked his last two movies and even with comments he said about that movie, makes me not interested in anything that Taika is doing in the future. 

• He said in the interview that he did it to help support his film and feed his kids. On the one hand, I applauded him for that. He’s a dad, his job is to look after his kids. I get that, I’m not trying to undermine that part of it. But the way he phrased it, sounds like he didn’t even care about Thor. Even joked in the article saying that Marvel is scraping the bottom of the barrel if they’re going to have him to direct a Thor movie. I get that he has a sense of humor, he might be joking when he says some of this. But it’s unclear whether or not he was joking, because fans read this as he doesn’t care about putting out a good franchise film, he just wants a paycheck. Taika, if you want to keep on working, that's not something to say. I read this and it makes sense as to why Ragnarok was such a jolt in tone for the Thor franchise. Where the first two films were more serious and Shakespearean films. Ragnarok is like Thor mixed with Flash Gordon. These comments make the tone of Ragnarok make so much more sense to me. And even why Love and Thunder didn’t work for me and didn’t work for very many people. Taika Waititi had no interest in making a Thor movie, he wanted to make a Taika Waititi movie. That makes me so nervous for his Star Wars movie. He directed some very solid episodes of The Mandalorian, I believe the finale to season 1 which is fantastic. But with his Star Wars movie, I don’t trust him. I don’t trust that he’ll try and make a good Star Wars movie. He’ll just try and make a good Taika Waititi movie. 

• Another thing, as reading this I had a thought. What are Chris Hemsworth’s thoughts on all of this? He had a movie coming out in June, Extraction 2 and while doing press for it he talked about how he realized they went too far with Love and Thunder. He showed the movie to his kids who are like 6 and 8 years old. And for the type of movie Love and Thunder is, they should be the target audience for the film. They watched it and told him “you went too far”. His kids told him that the target audience for the movie didn’t like it. Those comments make a lot more sense after what Taika has said. Even when doing press for Love and Thunder, he said he wasn’t happy with his performance or the way Thor: The Dark World played out. So as of now, he’s not happy with two of his four solo movies. The Dark World had a lot of behind the scenes drama and switching around of directors. As far we know, Love and Thunder didn’t have any behind the scenes drama. The reason why that movie came out so weird, wasn’t because of studio interference but because of Taika and not wanting to really direct a Thor movie. I really want to know what Chris Hemsworth is thinking right now, when he hears this news…what is going through his head.