One of the punishing things about the film industry from a creative perspective is that it's an ever-spinning wheel. In a normal year, a new movie hits theaters pretty much every single week, and studios are always in a rush to take advantage of the hottest new thing before that heat dissipates. An unfortunate common side effect is that the work suffers, as projects aren't given the proper time needed to be the best that they can be.
It's in recognition of this fact that director Taika Waititi can see a relatively minor silver lining in the COVID-19 pandemic that has caused the industry to shut down and his next blockbuster film, Thor: Love And Thunder, to be delayed from November 2021 to February 2022.
The filmmaker recently did an interview with Total Film, and among the subjects discussed was the recent news about Thor 4's release date changing. Taika Waititi is in the midst of writing the script for the Marvel Cinematic Universe sequel, and acknowledged that the extra time that has been provided from the on-going crisis is definitely a benefit:
There are a few positive things I can take away [from the COVID-19 crisis]. One of them is that a lot of these films, and films in general, are rushed, or you don’t have as much time as you’d want to have on the script and things like that.
In the making of a movie, only money exists on the same level as time in the rankings of valuable resources, and its something that pretty much every major production wishes it had more of when the big due date is looking. It is most certainly something that every filmmaker who has worked at Marvel Studios has had to deal with, as those projects set their release schedules years in advance.
Thor: Love And Thunder is a perfect example of this, as Marvel Studios first announced the project's aforementioned November 2021 release date in July 2019. Taika Waititi is still working on finishing his next film, the sports comedy Next Goal Wins, so it's understandable that the he would be appreciative of getting an extra three months to work on his follow-up to the beloved Thor: Ragnarok.
One thing that's special about Taika Waititi's role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that he happens to be a writer in addition to a director (he shares that in common with James Gunn and Ryan Coogler), and evidently he is feeling some gratitude about having additional time to develop the script for Thor: Love And Thunder. The writing process can sometimes be a bit clipped as big budget endeavors need to start making pre-production moves weeks prior to the start of principal photography, but Waititi's time writing the third Thor sequel has been padded. Discussing his work with co-writer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, he said,
We’re still writing Love And Thunder, and I think it’s good to just keep writing, and then you know, we’ll have a really, really good script. And with writing, especially, you should use as much of that time as possible to get your story right, because you never really get it later on. Film is an industry where you’re always complaining about not having enough time. I think, right now, we’ve given ourselves a huge amount of time to work on all sort of things, so we may as well use it.
As weird as it is to say right now, we could ultimately look back on the time during the COVID-19 pandemic as a great thing for creativity in Hollywood, as films that might have otherwise been mediocre are given the gift of time to improve. It's certainly something that we'll be tracking in the months and years ahead.
Barring any further changes, Thor: Love And Thunder – which is set to star Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tessa Thompson, Christian Bale, and Taika Waititi as Korg – will be arriving in theaters on February 18, 2022. Stay tuned here on CinemaBlend for all of the latest updates and news about the development of the project.
