Taika Waititi isn’t a new filmmaker. He’s been around long enough to know not to fall into fandom traps. Unfortunately, in a recent interview, Waititi explained that his first cut of “Thor: Love & Thunder” was around four hours long. Of course, this doesn’t mean he wanted to release a four-hour cut. But the idea of a Snyder Cut-esque edit of an MCU film is enough for fandom to go crazy. Alas, if you’re hoping a #ReleaseTheTaikaCut campaign would work, you’re mistaken.
“Thor: Love & Thunder” isn’t the runaway critical darling that “Thor: Ragnarok” was for Taika Waititi back in 2017. That isn’t to say ‘Love & Thunder’ is some complete misfire. It just doesn’t have the same impact that ‘Ragnarok’ had on the franchise. So, as you might imagine, the tease of a longer cut with deleted scenes that have been touted by stars of the film is too enticing for fans to be quiet about. And when a fandom gets motivated, the discourse surrounding a film changes. But as Waititi explained to NME, no amount of social media campaigning will result in a Waititi Cut of ‘Love & Thunder.’
“I watch director’s cuts of a lot of other directors. They suck,” Waititi explained. “Director’s cuts are not good. Directors need to be controlled sometimes, and if I was to say, ‘Oh, you wanna watch my director’s cut? It’s 4.5 hours long!’ It’s not good, at 4.5 hours. There’s a lot of cup-of-tea breaks in there. You don’t even have to pause it.”
If he did have the desire to add anything more to ‘Love & Thunder,’ the filmmaker admits it would be to add “a few more jokes,” but nothing major. As for the eventual home release of the film, don’t expect anything crazy in the deleted scenes section of the Blu-ray.
“There might be a couple of deleted scenes,” he added. “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.”
The two-hour, non-Director’s Cut of “Thor: Love & Thunder” is in theaters now.