Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder is not your typical Marvel movie in a number of ways. It’s goofier. It’s less serious (though it still finds room for a terrifying Christian Bale turn). It has a gorgeous scene in a Best Buy parking lot. It’s also quite a bit shorter. MCU movies tend to clock in around the 140 minute mark. One is even an epic. Thor 4? Gets it done in under two hours. It’s so short that some on social media are speculating that there could be one that’s twice as long, birthing the hashtag “#ReleaseTheWaititiCut.” Well, sorry, it ain’t gonna happen.
In an interview with NME (as caught by Variety), Waititi didn’t address the issue head-on but did imply he would never do one because he’s no fan of those editions. “I’ve been thinking about director’s cuts,” Waititi said. “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.”
He did, however, entertain the idea of what a Thor: Love and Thunder director’s cut would be like. “I’d say my cut would probably have a few more jokes in there,” he said. “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!”
We’re assuming he has no problem with director’s cuts that attempt to save a film butchered by studios: Blade Runner, Once Upon a Time in America, Nightbreed, Heaven’s Gate, and, of course, that storied “Snyder Cut” of Justice League. But maybe he doesn’t like them either.
Besides, if there was a four-hour version of Love and Thunder at any point, it was probably the assembly cut, which is nothing anyone would want to watch anyway.
