Taika Waititi’s “Thor: Love and Thunder” has hit cinemas, the film clocking in at a two-hour runtime which was whittled down from an assembly cut about double that length.
Criticism in reviews for the film paints it as being tonally disjointed and somewhat all over the place – the kind of complaints that can be solved with a longer cut. The actors themselves, including Christian Bale and Natalie Portman, have also talked about how plenty of scenes they shot ended up on the cutting room floor.
This has sparked calls of #ReleaseTheWaititiCut among some viewers keen to see an extended version of the film. Waititi, however, tells The NME (via Variety) he has no interest in not just a director’s cut on this film but on all director’s cuts:
“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.”
No mention there of films like James Cameron’s “The Abyss,” Ridley Scott’s “Kingdom of Heaven” or “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” which were ‘saved’ by their superior director’s cuts/special editions despite their rather bulky runtimes.
While Waititi was dismissive of the possibility, he still shared an idea of what he would do – namely, add more jokes:
“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!”
It’s not confirmed but quite possible “Thor: Love and Thunder” will have a September 8th debut on the Disney+ service and VOD platforms to coincide with the Disney+ Day event on that date.
