Thor: Love and Thunder has already raked in over US $302 million (approx. AUD $447 million) at the box office, making it undoubtedly a huge hit.
However, a podcaster has reaveled that director Taika Waititi was given a time run mandate and that a lot of important scenes were actually cut from the film.
In fact, according to The Ringer-Verse’s Joanna Robinson, so much was cut out that the storyline could have changed dramatically.
“Taika having a blank check on this is absolutely not the case. He got more leeway than he got with Ragnarok, but there was a mandate to bring this movie in under two hours. This comes in under two hours and they cut a ton of stuff out of this movie,” Robinson said on the latest episode of House of R.
She added that Waititi wasn’t allocated a director’s cuts and some actors were initially meant to have much larger parts.
“Taika is on record as not being in director’s cuts. We know Jeff Goldblum, Peter Dinklage, Lena Headey [were supposed to appear] and Simon Russell Beale appeared as Dionysus and had like two lines in this movie but has an above-the-line credit, so he was definitely supposed to be in this more. Gorr was definitely supposed to come in and kill a bunch of other people.”
However, Waititi has recently said that he believe’s it’s best when a movie doesn’t have a director’s cut. A director’s cut is when an additional version of the movie is released showing what the director wanted, rather than the first studio version, which is generally the mainstream version of the film.
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“I’ve been thinking about director’s cuts. I watch director’s cuts of a lot of other directors. They suck. Director’s cuts are not good. Directors need to be controlled sometimes and if I was to say, ‘ah you wanna watch my director’s cut? It’s four and a half hours long!’ It’s not good, at four and a half hours. There’s a lot of cup-of-tea breaks in there, you don’t even have to pause it,” Waititi explained to NME.
He added, “I’d say my cut would probably have a few more jokes in there. There might be a couple of deleted scenes but as I always say, a scene is deleted because it’s not good enough to be in the film. I think the deleted scenes section on the DVD, not that they use them anymore, should just be a list of the scenes and no links so you can’t click on them!”
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