The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been running for 10 years, and from the outside, it looks like it's mostly gone off exactly as planned. However, the head of Marvel Studios admits there's at least one thing he wishes he'd done differently. Kevin Feige says that looking back on the various Marvel movies after the fact, he sees numerous things that could have been done differently, but one of those things, remarkably, has to do with how they handled Thor's eyebrows. According to Feige...
I'll tell you one specific example I just thought of today and I laugh at it. Definitely, the one thing I would definitely do differently if I had to do it over again, is we would not have dyed Chris Hemsworth's eyebrows blonde in the first Thor. Because we were like, Thor is blonde! He has to be blond! And Hemsworth was great and awesome and pulled it off, but there are a couple of shots I watch and I'm like, oh my God, that poor guy, we made him freaking dye his eyebrows! That's ridiculous! And I can laugh about it now because Hemsworth is Thor and he doesn't need long hair, or a cape, or a hammer, or two eyeballs to be Thor.
One of the biggest criticisms that fans tend to have with superhero movies is that their favorite characters are not always portrayed on screen the way they are remembered from the comics. It turns out that this was a concern for Marvel Studios too, especially in the early days of the MCU, as Kevin Feige tells Uproxx the company felt it had to dye Chris Hemsworth's eyebrows to make him as blonde as possible.
Of course, now the mere idea that Thor even needed to be blonde in the first place seems silly. Chris Hemsworth has been a fantastic Thor and he's no less fantastic with short hair, even though the character is usually depicted with long hair. Certainly, if Thor hadn't been blonde in the first movie there would have been fans who took issue with it, there were some who took issue with Idris Elba's casting as Heimdall, but odds are they would have gotten over it after they actually saw Hemsworth's performance, as many did with Idris Elba.
It does show something of an extreme reaction to feel the need to dye a man's eyebrows, but at the time it surely seemed like it was necessary. Even Marvel let the preconceived notions of how the character should look dictate things. While that feeling has mostly remained intact over the years, Marvel has been more willing to break the molds that the comics created and let the film versions of the characters be different when it works best for the story.
There will surely be more things Kevin Feige wishes he did differently the longer the MCU moves forward, but overall, it seems like things are going pretty well. Avengers: Infinity War opens Friday.
